The most common defense of Obama…
…is that he’s a fool rather than a knave. It’s come down to that.
There are still defenders (or at least partial defenders) of Obama’s Middle East policy, and they’re not even all liberals. Ross Douthat, one of those partial defenders, is a NY Times conservative, meaning that every now and then he actually writes something conservative but often occupies some in-between wavering zone instead.
Douthat summarizes what he thinks happened during the Bush years in Iraq, a description that serves as part of the build-up for his semi-apologia for Obama:
…[I]t took all the king’s horses and all of David Petraeus’s men just to hold Iraq together; a different bad actor, Iran, ended up empowered; and the old problem of repression led to the Arab Spring and the civil wars that followed.
Sticking to the Pax Americana model after these developments would have required keeping American troops in Iraq for decades.
Douthat is ignoring the hard-fought improvements that had been made in Iraq by the time Obama took office, so dramatic that even Obama declared the state relatively stable and successful. By the time Obama pulled the troops out entirely in 2011 it would not have taken “all the king’s horses and all of David Petraeus’s men just to hold Iraq together” any more, and the “American troops in Iraq for decades” would have been a relatively small force. We’ve had troops all around the world “for decades” (many of them since World War II and the Korean War) and this would have been a particularly cost-effective deployment. There was no need to pull out entirely as Obama did (except what he saw as his own political interest), and the result has been a much greater amount of influence over Iraq for that bad actor, Iran—a bad actor Obama is now actively rather than passively encouraging and empowering.
Douthat thinks the following overarching plan is what’s behind Obama’s foreign policy decisions:
Haltingly but persistently, this administration has pursued a paradigm shift in how the United States relates to the Middle East, a shift from a Pax Americana model toward a strategy its supporters call “offshore balancing.”
In a Pax Americana system, the United States enjoys a dominant position within a network of allies and clients; actors outside that network are considered rogues and threats, to be restrained and coerced by our overwhelming military might. Ideally, over time our clients become more prosperous and more democratic, the benefits of joining the network become obvious, and the military canopy both expands and becomes less necessary.
In an offshore balancing system, our clients are fewer, and our commitments are reduced. Regional powers bear the primary responsibility for dealing with crises on the ground, our military strategy is oriented toward policing the sea lanes and the skies, and direct intervention is contemplated only when the balance of power is dramatically upset.
I fail to see any “balancing” that’s being set up by Obama. Seems to be all Iran, all the time.
Douthat realizes this, but doesn’t understand that it’s purposeful on Obama’s part:
…[O]ffshore balancing offers the most benefits when your entanglements are truly minimal, but it’s very hard for a hegemon to simply sidle offstage, shedding expectations and leaving allies in the lurch.
And letting bad guys get even more powerful.
…[O]ffshoring American power and hoping that Iran, Iran’s Sunni neighbors and Israel will find some kind of balance on their own will probably increase the risk of arms races, cross-border invasions and full-scale regional war. The conflicts we have now are ugly enough, but absent the restraint still imposed by American military dominance, it’s easy to imagine something worse.
That’s kind of a no-brainer, isn’t it? I wonder how Douthat would explain Obama’s seeming failure to see something so elementary. But he doesn’t say; he doesn’t even try. The article pretty much ends there, with just some generalities to tie it up.
That’s the problem faced by those who would be the least bit kind to Obama at this point. They end up writing things that sound at best confused. I’m picking on Douthat, but I’m not really meaning to single him out; his is just the first article I happened to encounter.
The comments to Douthat’s article are the usual NY Times reader stuff. We’re in the Middle East only for oil, it’s all Bush and Cheney’s fault, etc.
Walter Russell Mead voted for Obama in 2008, and by November 2010 still thought it to have been a good move for reasons so strange and convoluted I cannot follow them (be my guest and try to understand what he’s saying here; suffice to say he was wrong, wrong, wrong and showed a profound lack of understanding of the man whose character and plans were already crystal clear.). Today, however, Mead is singing a different tune:
…[N]obody should miss the most important point here: even the President’s ideological fellow travelers can no longer mount a cogent defense of his Middle East policy. The MSM will still do all it can to avoid connecting the dots or drawing attention to the stark isolation in which the White House now finds itself as ally after ally drops away. It still doesn’t want to admit that the “smart diplomacy” crowd has been about as effective at making a foreign policy as the famous emperor’s smooth-talking tailors were at making a new suit of clothes. But it’s getting harder and harder to find anybody willing to gush about how snazzy the President looks in the sharp foreign policy outfit that he’s sporting around town.
Mead’s a smart man; I cannot understand why he was so fooled originally. But he’s not so fooled any more:
The shocked silence of the foreign policy establishment, the absence of any statements of support from European or Asian allies about our Middle East course, the evidence that the President and the “senior officials” whom he trusts continue to be blindsided by major developments they didn’t expect and haven’t provided for: all of this tells us that our Middle East policy is indeed in free fall.
Much like Douthat, though, Mead describes the president and his advisors as being “blindsided” by “major developments they didn’t expect and haven’t provided for.” In other words, Mead comes down firmly on the “fool” side of the “knave vs. fool” question. I’m not sure why, except I think that, for those who once supported Obama as both a smart and a good man, it’s easier and less threatening for them to think they were wrong about his brainpower than about his goodness.
[NOTE: I found an unintentionally funny comment to this article:
It’s suspicious how hard Nothinyahoo and the GOP are trying to stop a peace process. They seem like this is so urgent, like their lives depend on it…]
I’m convinced that since Obama doesn’t have to win re-election he is doing all he can to damage the US. He is like a retreating army following a scorched earth policy.
To be fair to WRM, he probably wasn’t reading a lot of right leaning blogs. A lot of people took O at his word and didn’t want to look too deeply. What mystifies me more is someone like Althouse who in 2012 didn’t make up her mind until a few weeks before the election. I know she at least reads Instapundit.
‘Smart’ people are rarely as smart as they appear. Speaking as a full fledged peasant I know to never trust those who self identify as brahmans. Dirt on your fingers common sense trumps a phd where the metal meets the bone in the real world.
KLSmith:
He didn’t have to read right-leaning blogs to come to a conclusion about Obama. All he had to do was observe, learn about his past, and think. I’m serious; I don’t get how all these people didn’t see it.
“”I’m serious; I don’t get how all these people didn’t see it.””
Neo
They didn’t see it because they’d just endured 4 years of a non stop media onslaught turning GW Bush and republicans into rich monsters who waterboarded prisoners for fun and hated poor people.
To anyone who fell for that crap, Obama must have looked like a very reasonable man.
SteveH:
Oh, I understand that about people in general.
I meant I don’t see why people like Mead don’t see it. Mead is very very smart, and not particularly to the left although a Democrat. I thought he thought more clearly than that, and more for himself.
Neo you would think. Im not sure intelligence alone plays much of a roll in defense to propaganda. Just look at most of academia and their reflexive anti conservative bent.
I refer to intelligence without wisdom as the articulate retarded.
” . . . in free fall.”
And there’s the tell. The policy is certainly not in free fall, as it is bearing the fruits which were expected of it by those who formulated it. Welcome to your long awaited justice, America. Your executive is pleased to bring it to you. Just as he would admonish his very young children, this punishment is all for your own good. Whether you childish people can admit your wrongdoing or not, judgment has been rendered and will now be carried out.
“Mead is very very smart”
Smart enough to vote for his messiah twice??? That is not very very smart, its willful blind deaf speechless monkey shine.
Here’s what Walter Russell Mead wrote in November 2010 about why he voted for Obama in 2008:
I’m dumbstruck at the sheer dopiness of all that.
parker; Ann:
I obviously am not saying that Mead’s vote[s] for Obama are evidence of his smart smartness. I had thought Mead smart before that.
This piece by Mead was what I was basing it on.
Obama is smart enough to be a Chicago crook. Can a crook be a fool? Sure but at heart they will always be a crook (knave). I thought in 2008 he wanted power like LBJ or some other machine Democrat pol. But watching the way he and the missus spend money it is definitely about money. They want it and then they want more.
Two sources you need to read and share on Obama’s responsibility for what happened to the stabilized, progressing Iraq that Obama inherited from Bush:
In Foreign Policy magazine, Ali Khedery, perhaps the longest serving US official from Operation Iraqi Freedom, attributes (link) the regression of Iraq since Bush left office to decisions by Obama from the outset in 2009, including the pull-out in 2011.
In Foreign Affairs magazine, Rick Brennan, a senior advisor in Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2006 to 2011, describes (link) “the bungling of the Iraq exit” by Obama.
BONUS: December 2010 UN Security Council press release (link) on Iraq that provides a compelling picture of Iraq’s “peaceful progress” (Obama) before US forces were removed the following year.
Setting the record straight on the grounds for Operation Iraqi Freedom is a hobby horse of mine. As much as I’ve encountered it, it’s still a jolt both how wrong and how pervasive is the prevailing false narrative of OIF. Most on the Right adopt the frame and at least some of the premises of the Left’s false narrative of OIF.
A featured omission in the false narrative is that Clinton’s enforcement of the Gulf War ceasefire has utterly disappeared from the discourse, despite that Clinton’s entire presidency was preoccupied trying to enforce Saddam’s compliance with the UN mandates, Bush’s case against Saddam was really Clinton’s case against Saddam, and Bush’s enforcement procedure with Operation Iraqi Freedom carried forward Clinton’s enforcement procedure from Operation Desert Fox. Indeed, the Blix-led UNMOVIC inspections that found “about 100 unresolved disarmament issues” that were the principal trigger for OIF explicitly carried forward from the Butler-led UNSCOM inspections that triggered ODF.
Bush was faithful to Clinton’s law, policy, and precedent with Saddam and effectively managed the coda to Clinton’s Iraq enforcement, yet the critical context that Bush followed Clinton on Iraq has been wiped away in the discourse.
By the same token, and I believe by the same deliberate narrative strategy, Obama’s record with Iraq has been largely wiped away in the discourse on the current state of Iraq, even by pundits like Douthat who are nominally of the Right and hold themselves out to be thoughtful and educated. (In fact, Douthat normally adopts the frame of the prevailing liberal-Left narrative and thus acts as a foil.)
Read the Khedery and Brennan articles (plus the Dec 2010 UN press release) and don’t let people get away with whitewashing Obama’s errors on Iraq.
There’s another factor which may–I have no idea–fit in with Mead’s choice. It’s what folks have said about Peggy Noonan’s choice.
NOKD. “Not Our Kind, Dear”. For some, that trumps everything.
Mead’s essay, which you quoted, seems to be incomprehensible. Implications–corruption in the GOP means we have to go Dem???????????
Obama is so lame he can’t mess things up?????? We’re going to get a bunch of smart guys to tell Obama what to do??????
I never smoked anything like that.
The most disastrous aspect of Obama’s maladroit strategy is that he has simultaneously alienated the Saudis, Russians, Chinese, and Germans.
Russia and China are forming an economic bloc, and what happens if the Saudis do not recycle petrodollars? We lose reserve currency status. Our economy goes down in flames. World economy realigns, hard, as in depression and war.
You think China wasn’t paying attention when Russia grabbed Crimea? It’s only a matter of time for Taiwan.
Goodbye Asia, goodbye Central Europe, hello nuclear Middle East. I shudder to think for Israel.
gpc31,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Infrastructure_Investment_Bank
Sorry guys but I’m in no mood to make excuses for those who voted for Obama and who have supported him and enabled him every step of the way. He is a knave and his supporters are also knaves who have made Obama possible. When Obama supporters act surprised that Obama empowers our enemies and weakens our friends they are just deflecting blame for the death and chaos which they should have known was coming when they voted for him.
If they have really changed their minds about Obama, they will support his impeachment for dereliction of duty if the need arises. They won’t. If the time ever comes when the Republicans are forced to act on impeachment, these erstwhile repentant voters will reappear in their full Obama girl regalia and will bay hysterically for the blood of anyone who opposes their messiah.
This piece by Mead in the WSJ in August 2013 is all about the disaster that is Obama’s foreign policy, but Mead still can’t bring himself to backtrack even a little in his original assessments:
Sheesh.
And apparently he didn’t vote for Obama in 2012, at least that’s what I get from this bit, since this article was written in 2013 :
A lot of people underestimate the extent to which someone can be both a knave *and* a fool. Obama acts like a fool in many ways but it doesn’t mitigate his knavishness (knavity?) one bit. Especially in foreign policy. I have not seen any craftily concocted schemes from him, rather he gives the impression he is making it up as he goes along, confident that his “aura” will overpower everyone and get them to do things his way. But his moves are all informed by his arrogance and ideology which is where the knave comes in.
FOAF: I agree. Perhaps I’m hopelessly naive, but I do believe it’s quite possible to be a fool AND a knave, and I do believe that President Obama is both. Sometimes I think he is a fool in some aspects and a knave in others; sometimes I think that his foolishness has caused him to act as a knave, because of the multitude of things he doesn’t understand (and has no excuse to not understand).
For example, I believe that President Obama has a profound mistrust of military forces, and will use them as little as possible; I think he sees them as simply the trappings of a tin-pot dictator in a banana republic, which he, therefore, does not need or want. The flip side of this coin is that he seems to believe that talking can cure nearly anything, and that HIS talking, in particular, has special powers for solving otherwise intractable problems. (He ought to have learned otherwise, early on, when he used the full force of his personality to try to bring the Olympics to Chicago, and was laughed at and humiliated for it. Unfortunately, President Obama has not shown great capacity for learning from his own mistakes.)
It’s possible that all of this is due to malice; certainly, many have been perfectly ready to accuse him of just that. I’ve read convincing analyses of his behavior, describing him as nothing more than a phenomenally successful con-man. And perhaps this is so. But my gut tells me, as the aphorism goes, not to ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by ignorance and stupidity.
It would be interesting to address such questions to the all-but-unreachable Valerie Jarrett, the unelected power behind the throne, she of the apparently unshakable confidence in our President’s genius and soaring talent. “Ms. Jarrett, it is now increasingly acknowledged that the President’s unforced errors, such as the unprecedented capitulation to a sworn enemy of the United States, and the equally unprecedented hostile acts toward a staunch ally of the United States, are signs of either profound ignorance, or outright malice toward the interests of the United States. Ignorance or malice; stupidity or evil. You’ve said many times that Barack Obama is smarter than just about anyone… so which is it?”
I doubt anyone will ask her that to her face.
As SteveH responds above, intelligence doesn’t play an exclusive role because, as I’ve offered before we’re dealing with a belief system, not logical or rational argumentation.
Mead has the benefit of vast knowledge in foreign policy and note that much of his criticism and disappointment with Obama has to do with foreign rather than domestic policy. I suggest that Mead has not changed his foreign policy belief system, but rather now recognizes that Obama runs counter to it. What took so long? Obama is a con artist running a game [see Daniel in Brookline @ 10:03 above] and the dissonance between Obama’s actions and Mead’s belief system only became obvious as the results of Obama’s policies began to emerge. Remember the old adage that if one is in a room and can’t figure out who the “mark” is, then you’re the “mark”! It took Mead and others some time to realize this even though he and they may still be loathe to admit it. (see Ann @ 9:59 pm above).
T:
I am totally aware that smart people (like Mead) can be fooled in that way. My question is more about the “how” of it than a lack of understanding that it does happen. I’ve never quite understood how people can be so perceptive in one area, or many areas, and yet so deficient in evaluating people and in recognizing evil or lies.
I wrote about Obama as a con artist back in November of 2009, here, so I’ve been aware of it for a long, long time.
I have tried to think of a scenario that explains Obama’s ME policy other than “Take any side against America’s best interests”, “I am the guy who can bring peace, rainbows and unicorns to the ME” or simply “Magic 8 ball.” I finally thought of one.
What if this guy (or the people who control him) are fundamentalist Sunni caliphate true believers? If the caliphate needs physical and expanding territory to gain legitimacy and incoming backers why not:
1) Abandon Iraq to instability
2) Destabilize somewhat stable, secular ME nations to create random chaos
3) Provide material support to Sunni jihadist organizations to directly or indirectly aid the right kind of people
Thanks to these steps, parts of Iraq and Syria are now, effectively, a caliphate, physical territory under strict sharia rule where Shiites and a good number of improperly pious Sunnis are being murdered.
But what about the rest? Why the kissy-face with Iran, a mortal enemy of Islamic State? Watching the Yemen situation made me realize: who else is an enemy of IS?
Oh yes, of course, Saudi Arabia and most of the remaining Sunni nations with sufficient means to repel the likes of IS. So why not empower Iran to confront Saudi Arabia, with which it has ongoing, iffy-at-best relations, and hope that any sort of all-out confrontation would weaken both of Islamic State’s enemies and give it a chance to gobble up more scraps of land?
Neo,
My comment (@1:26 pm) wasn’t intended as a criticism, but a possible explication. I offer that the reason people can be fooled is because they believe in a certain way. A belief system only changes from internal impetus, not from an external imposition of logic or force.
With all respect, I also offer that you, by your own admission, were once one of the smart people who were fooled in a similar way. It took a personal epiphany for you to begin to see the dissonance that was already apparent to others. For you, the catalyst was admittedly 9/11; for Mead it was, perhaps the dissonance between his own knowledge of foreign affairs and the current results of Obama’s influence; only Mead himself really knows. You were not fooled by Obama because you had already discarded certain aspects of your former belief system; Mead apparently had not.
In any case, the individual must want to change, or at least question/investigate the current state of his/her belief. In recent posts, ACE (at Ace of Spades) has referred to liberal beliefs as “sacral.” By definition such a belief system is open to neither question nor compromise. Its just like the old joke about how many psycologists does it take to change a lightbulb? None; the lightbulb must want to change itself. You did, now Mead has.
IMO the answer to the question “How can smart people be so deluded and fooled for so long?” resides for each of us (liberal or conservative; male or female, etc.), in just how “sacred” we believe any of our various belief systems to be.
T:
I have no way of knowing, but I don’t think I would ever, at any point, have been fooled by Obama. I didn’t care for Clinton, by the way. I voted for him because I was a Democrat, but I certainly didn’t fear Clinton.
Plus—very much unlike Mead—I was not a political junkie, a pundit, or someone who paid much attention at all to politics or government or history. The more attention I paid (which happened to have been post 9/11), the more I changed party affiliation. Mead is a scholar/writer on these subjects, and has been for years. He’s not just smart, he’s an expert on the subject, which I never was. That’s why I’m surprised he was fooled, and that’s why the analogy to me does not hold up.
Kyndyll: “Why the kissy-face with Iran”
A factor is Afghanistan where Iran also has influence.
Mead is a Democrat, that is self explanary. The other one is NY Times, that is also self explanatory.
Neither have paid the price for true wisdom or knowledge, certainly not concerning evil.
The Jacksonian tradition is in other words, the old Democrat tradition. Mead was enamored with this kind of Southern mystique, which is a result of ignoring the true history of the Democrat party, while paying attention to America’s sanitized tale of the Democrat party. Normally the victor writes the history books, except the Civil War was not won by one side alone. In Reconstruction times, the Democrats surfaced. While they did not get their slaves back, they got something arguably better. Sherman did not annihilate the land owning class, he merely broke some of their stuff. That wasn’t enough in the post war era. That is why he is hated and feared. Much as the Left fears and hates Pinochet, because he did real damage.
It takes strength of will to recognize and accept the truth for what it is, rather than believing in fairy tales or mystical legends of Messiah spiritual journeys. Hussein offered Mead the “Great Return” of Democrat myth. How it should have been. How Democrats always thought their side was really about, in the Civil War.
A big brain on top of a weak spine, is going to do what again? I can tip that over and shatter the skull on the concrete like a broken egg. Of what worth is that in a war? Some war leader reads Sun Tzu and becomes just as good? That’s not how it works.
Mead and other intellectuals like him, are incomplete. Their weaknesses are legion. Thus it is predictable that they will Fall, for all manner of things. They are no Socrates, no Plato, and certainly no Aristotle.