In today's New York Times, Nick Kristof responds to polling showing a vast majority of the public disapproves of the President's foreign policy by mounting a stirring defense of the President in an Op-Ed risibly titled "Obama's Weakness, or Ours."
The problem? The defense is a melange of fail - replete with faulty assumptions, poor logic, and naked appeals to sentiment. As a defense of President Obama's foreign policy, it doesn't accomplish much. But as an illustration of the lengths partisan media outlets (liberal and conservative both) will go to carry the water for a favored political figure, it's invaluable.
The problem? The defense is a melange of fail - replete with faulty assumptions, poor logic, and naked appeals to sentiment. As a defense of President Obama's foreign policy, it doesn't accomplish much. But as an illustration of the lengths partisan media outlets (liberal and conservative both) will go to carry the water for a favored political figure, it's invaluable.
Let's get to it. Kristoff starts by setting the table:
The odds are that you think President Obama’s foreign policy is a failure.
That’s the scathing consensus forming, with just 36 percent of Americans approving of Obama’s foreign policy in a New York Times/CBS News pollreleased this week. Foreign policy used to be a source of strength for the president, and now it’s dragging him down — and probably other Democrats with him.
People aren't happy with the President's foreign policy, and that's likely to have electoral consequences. Fair enough. But Kristof quickly moves on to what he thinks is the real problem -- those mean Republicans:
Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, warns that Obama “has weakened the national security posture of the United States.” Trent Franks, a Republican member of the House from Arizona, cites foreign policy to suggest that Obama is “the most inept president we have ever had.”This is smart rhetoric. Pair a measured factual assertion that can be examined and debated ("the President's foreign policy has weakened the national security posture of the United States") with a hyperbolic, exaggerated and fact-free potshot from a Republican back-bencher ("President Obama "is the most inept president we've ever had"), in order to falsely imply they are equivalently easy to dismiss.
They aren't. The claim that President Obama is "the most inept ever" is not worthy of debate. For example, he hasn't presided over a massive economic collapse and depression while banning alcohol (Hoover), hasn't helped ensure a civil war by failing to bridge the North-South divide (Buchanan), hasn't strongly supported the extension of slavery to new states (Fillmore), hasn't led the U.S. into a war that drained it of blood and treasure based on faulty intelligence (Bush II), etc. He certainly isn't a great president - but he isn't remotely "the worst", either, except in the fevered imaginations of die-hard partisan Republicans.
The claim that Obama has weakened America's national security posture? That's a completely different kettle of fish. There's a clear current running through reports on the attitudes of officials in friendly foreign governments that they simply no longer feel they can rely on America living up to its rhetoric on foreign policy (which is directly traceable to mis-steps like the Syrian "red line"). It's fair to ask whether there were better alternatives available to the President (though "talk softly and carry a big stick" seems like an obvious one for the Syrian debacle, for example). But McConnell's position can't be rejected out of hand (as Kristof does) and is worthy of serious consideration.
That's not something Kristof is willing to give. Instead, he identifies "three issues" the Republicans have been "unfair" to Obama on:
Obama is no Messiah, but this emerging narrative about a failed foreign policy is absurdly harsh. Look at three issues where Republicans have been unfairly jabbing him with pitchforks:Again, a nice rhetorical flourish - the Republicans, you see, are devils, complete with pitchforks.
So, what are the three issues? Here's the first:
Trading five Taliban prisoners for Bowe Bergdahl was unpopular with the public, and the Obama administration may have made the trade in the incorrect belief that Bergdahl was near death. Then again, here’s an American soldier who spent five years in Taliban custody, some of that reportedly in a cage after trying to escape. If we make heroic efforts to bring back American corpses, how can we begrudge efforts to bring back a soldier who is still alive?To begin, Kristof concedes that the administration may have been fooled into making the trade by misinformation about Bergdahl's health. That Kristof thinks this is a defense of the President is astounding: getting the intelligence on which you base a major foreign policy decision wrong is, in and of itself a foreign policy failure. That's as true in the case of the Bergdahl swap as it was in the case of Iraq's "Weapons of Mass Destruction" - if, in all likelihood, with less disastrous consequences (short of one of the detainees morphing into the next leader of the Taliban and becoming responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, it's hard to imagine it being anywhere close to as disastrous a miscalculation).
Next, Kristof compares the Bergdahl swap with "heroic efforts to bring back American corpses" - without detailing what those efforts were. There are several problems with this argument.
First, it's comparing apples with oranges. I'm unaware of (and a quick Google search didn't turn up) any incidents of the U.S. trading prisoners for corpses of fallen soldiers (Israel, in contrast, has done just that). The "heroic efforts" the U.S. undertakes to recover corpses involve extensive expenditures of time and money, and even putting fellow soldiers in harms' way. I doubt that anyone would have criticized the U.S. for spending time and money, and even risking soldiers, to rescue Bergdahl. In fact, the U.S. did make rescue attempts, and nobody has criticized the US for making them. That, however, is not remotely the equivalent of releasing dangerous terrorists to get Bergdahl back, and pretending that the two are the same (without expressly saying so) is a signal that Kristof understands that his argument is flawed.
Second, if, as now seems likely, Bergdahl was a Taliban captive solely because he walked off base in disillusionment with his country and army service, the comparison is even worse. Fallen soldiers have honored their commitment to the country, army, and fellow soldiers, and paid the ultimate price for doing so. Suggesting that the efforts we make on their behalf should be equal to the effort we owe a deserter is insulting to the fallen soldiers and their sacrifice. We owe far more to those who honor their commitments than we do to those who repudiate them.
Indeed, Kristof's antiseptic phrase - "how can we begrudge efforts to bring back a soldier who is still alive" - ignores the actual thrust of the criticism: not that "efforts were made," but the cost of recovering Bergdahl.
Only after having led with a paragraph that attacks the very idea of criticizing the Bergdahl trade for any reason does Kristof get into the details. Laughably, here's his argument:
Sure, there are risks. But the five Taliban prisoners have probably aged out of field combat, and, if they return to Afghanistan after their year in Qatar, they would likely have trouble finding American targets because, by then, the United States will no longer be engaged in combat.Can you spot the problems?
Let's start with the claim that the Taliban prisoners "have probably aged out of field combat." Let's even grant that naked assumption. So what? Osama bin Laden had also "aged out of field combat." So have Ayman al Zawahiri and Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. Anwar al-Awlaki was never a "field combatant."
The point is obvious. The released Taliban prisoners aren't dangerous because they might pick up a gun and shoot an American soldier on the field of battle. They are dangerous because they are commanders, leaders of men, planners of battles. They are Taliban generals, not privates, and evaluating the threat they pose by whether they have "aged out of battle" is like saying General Martin Dempsey, currently Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has no military value because, as a 62 year-old, he's "probably aged out of field combat."
The rest of Kristof's argument is equally ludicrous. Generals and planners of campaigns can aid the enemy war effort from Qatar as well as within Afghanistan. Perhaps not as effectively - but suggesting that it is impossible for them to have an impact from a distance simply ignores the reality of today's interconnected world.
As for the point that the U.S. will be out of Afghanistan by the time the swapped prisoners get home, again, so what? The U.S. is out of Iraq, too - or at least it was, until ISIS started taking territory, and now we're sending U.S. personnel back in. If a resurgent Taliban reclaims Afghanistan - or worse, begins to more seriously threaten nuclear-club member Pakistan - is there any doubt the U.S. will be drawn back in? At best, Kristof's argument is myopically shortsighted. Criticisms of the Bergdahl deal are legitimate, and not "unfair" to the poor, maligned President.
Finally on this topic, Kristof ends with:
More broadly, there’s nothing wrong with negotiating with the Taliban. The blunt truth is that the only way to end the fighting in Afghanistan is a negotiated peace deal involving the Taliban, and maybe this deal can be a step along that journey.It's true that there's nothing wrong, in concept, with negotiating with a combatant army. Short of the utter demolition of the Taliban - which is impossible or at least highly unlikely given their bases in Pakistan - there will need to be a negotiated peace deal to end the combat. But it is in that context that a swap of high level Taliban detainees for Bergdahl would have made sense. More, the odds of a negotiated peace are essentially zero given the timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops announced by the President. Why would the Taliban accept a deal, when they can simply wait a year, get their top commanders back from Qatar, and reignite their offensive without need to worry about fighting U.S. soldiers?
In other words, far from being "a step along the journey to a negotiated peace," the Bergdahl swap and timeline announcement diminish the likelihood of any peace deal.
Russian aggression in Ukraine was infuriating, but it’s petty Washington politics to see it as emanating from Obama weakness. After all, President George W. Bush was the most trigger-happy of recent presidents, and he couldn’t prevent Russia from invading Georgia in 2008 and helping carve off two breakaway republics.
In other words, far from establishing that "even a strong President can't stop crazy Russia," Kristof's example drives home the criticism: Russia is at its most aggressive when it has little to fear in the way of U.S. response.
More, the comparison between Crimea/Ukraine and Abkhazia-South Ossetia/Georgia is a poor one. Abkhazia and Georgia had been in active military and political conflict for years - since Georgian independence from Russia in the early 1990s, in fact. There was active war between Abkhazia and Georgia in 1992, with Abkhazia losing. South Ossetia attempted to secede from Georgia in 1990, and fought wars with Georgia in 1991-92 and 2004. Comparing that to Russia's lopping Crimea off of the Ukraine by invasion is nonsense. Crimea had been part of the Ukraine for 50 years, with Crimeans expressly renouncing separatism (in exchange for significant autonomy) in 1992.
In other words, what Russia did in 2008 was take sides in an already existing and fiery dispute between Georgia and two regions that Georgia considered part of its territory but which fiercely proclaimed their independence. What Russia did in 2012 was foment and militarily support a secessionist movement within a strategically important region of Ukraine when Russia's bought-and-paid-for Ukrainian leader, Viktor Yanukovitch, was ousted by Ukrainian protesters.
Obama diplomacy appears to have worked better than military force would have. Contrary to early expectations, Russia did not seize southeastern Ukraine along with Crimea, and President Vladimir Putin of Russia this week called on Parliament to rescind permission to invade Ukraine. Be wary, but let’s hope the Bear is backing down.First of all, what "early expectations" had Russia seizing southeatern Ukraine? Crimea wasn't a land grab. The home of Russia's Black Sea Fleet's Sevastopol base, Crimea was strategically important to Russia, and Putin acted to ensure that it stayed within Russia's control. Southeastern Ukraine, in contrast, has no strategic utility to Russia.
Second, when the best you can say about the President's foreign policy is "well, at least Russia only took a small, strategically important chunk of territory from a neighboring state, instead of taking a larger piece of territory too . . ." well, you aren't really praising that foreign policy.
That's not to say there was some magic bullet the President could have relied on to stop Russia from taking Crimea once events were in motion. But in all likelihood, the President's unwillingness to act after Syria crossed his "red line" - and that he clearly stomped on his Secretary of State when Kerry appeared to be taking the "red line" seriously enough to suggest military action was imminent - helped set the conditions for Putin's moves. After all, even if it didn't work, what did Russia have to fear in making the attempt?
Kristof then moves on to Iraq:
The debacle in Iraq is a political and humanitarian catastrophe, but it’s a little rich for neocons to blame Obama after they created the mess in the first place. Obama was unengaged on Iraq and Syria, but it’s not clear that even if he had been engaged the outcome would have been different.
Suppose Obama had kept 10,000 troops in Iraq as his critics wish. Some would have been killed; others injured. We would have spent another $50 billion or so in the Iraqi sands (that’s more than 25 times what Obama requested to start universal prekindergarten, but Congress balks at the expense). And Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki might have felt even less need to keep Sunni tribes on his side. Would all this really have been the best use of American lives and treasure?
The question isn't what the outcome "clearly" would have been had the President acted differently. The question is whether it is reasonable to believe a different decision would have led to a better chance of a good outcome. And that is really hard to argue against. Kristof can speculate about what al-Maliki "might have done" had the U.S. maintained a presence in Iraq - but the reality is al-Maliki didn't indulge in the sectarian bullying that undid the gains of the surge and Sunni Awakening until after the U.S. left. And we certainly wouldn't have the Islamic State in Iraq & Syria - which splintered off from al Qaeda because al Qaeda was "too moderate" for ISIS - controlling territory in Iraq (more on ISIS and Syria in a bit).
I'm also not sure where Kristof gets his $50 billion number from. He links to an article on troop costs in Afghanistan, which mentions per-troop costs in Iraq in 2004 being $400,000. That would equate to roughly 4 billion dollars per 10,000 troops per year. Even factoring in inflation since 2004, there's no way to get from 4 billion to 50 billion unless you are adding costs up over a decade - which is a long time to project out costs, and ignores likely changes to cost structures under a permanent Status of Forces agreement. And at the end of the day, if ISIS develops a statelet in the heart of Iraq from which it can destabilize Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Iran (which it is bidding fair to do), we are likely to look back at $50 billion as a cheap price to pay.
Yes, Obama has made his share of mistakes, especially in Syria, where he doesn’t seem to have much of a policy at all. Partly balancing that, he helped to defuse the Syrian chemical weapons threat.
Syria isn't just a mistake, it's a disaster. The U.S. could likely have preempted the rise of ISIS by more forcefully aiding the original Syrian rebels. Instead, for fear of arming them lest the arms eventually "fall into the wrong hands," we ensured that jihadi elements would be the strongest among the rebels and enabled the rise of ISIS - which has now captured the advanced weapons the U.S. put in the hands of the Iraqi army.
As for that silver lining . . . well, Kristof may want to pay a little more attention to the news. Since the President "defused" the Syrian chemical weapons threat, Syria has made "systemic use" of chlorine gas, a chemical weapon. This is shocking. After all, Syrian compliance with the chemical weapons rules was all but guaranteed by Russia, which is a notable adherent to international law (see above). The President, to put it crudely, got played on Syria. A paper agreement that hasn't stopped Assad from deploying chemical weapons isn't a foreign policy success, it's an abject failure.
Look, the world is a minefield. President Clinton was very successful internationally, yet he bungled an inherited operation in Somalia, delayed too long on Bosnia, missed the Rwanda genocide and muffed the beginning of the Asian financial crisis — and all that happened during a particularly skillful administration.
As for former Vice President Dick Cheney complaining about Obama’s foreign policy, that’s a bit like the old definition of chutzpah: killing your parents and then pleading for mercy because you’re an orphan. In the Bush/Cheney years, we lost thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, we became mired in Afghanistan, Iran vastly expanded the number of centrifuges in its nuclear program, and North Korea expanded its arsenal of nuclear weapons. And much of the world came to despise us.
Yes, foreign policy is hard. And no, the Bush/Cheney years - complete with not only the Iraq war, but the Bush-Putin Soul Gaze (tm) - weren't banner years for American foreign policy, either. But "Bush was just as bad (or worse)" isn't a defense of President Obama. It's just finger pointing and attention shifting. President Obama's foreign policy has been a disaster, start to finish. His very first major foreign policy decision was to abandon the Green Revolution to the tender mercy of the Basiji. Hashtag diplomacy in Nigeria, leading from behind in Libya, Syrian peace conferences and red lines that amount to green lights to the Assad regime, the schizophrenic handling of Egypt, the Afghan timeline and feckless Iraqi withdrawal without a status of forces agreement - all of it has been a disaster. America's standing in the world has fallen on President Obama's watch. We are certainly no more loved than we were in the Bush days, and a lot less feared. That's not a good combination.
And here's the final absurdity from Kristof:
Blowing things up is often satisfying, and Obama’s penchant for muddling along instead, with restraint, is hurting him politically. But that’s our weakness more than his. Obama’s foreign policy is far more deft — and less dangerous — than the public thinks, and he doesn’t deserve the harsh assessments. If there’s one thing we should have learned in the Bush/Cheney years, it’s that swagger and invasion are overrated as foreign policy instruments.Because the only two options, apparently, are "blow stuff up" and "do nothing." That false choice is at the heart of the Obama foreign policy debacle. President Obama has defined his foreign policy ethos as "don't do stupid stuff." But as Edmund Burke so eloquently pointed out, inaction has its own dangers. The world today is suffering from them.
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