First, call me dan.
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I understand if you’ve kind of come in the middle of the conversation. In the previous thread, gandalf and I went at it for quite awhile and it encompassed quite a few pages. I understand your reluctance to go into that thread and delve through the posts, but at the same time, I don’t really feel like re-hashing or repeating myself. I’m certainly open to expanding on certain issues, or clarifying certain things.
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Not trying to make you re-hash everything, but it is not really fair to bury a few good remarks in several pages of poor quality posts (not criticizing yours specifically). I will try to work with what you have here.
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And my posts recently were addressed to gandalf, who was in on the discussion and (I assumed) read through my posts. If I do repeat myself, it’s because my posts weren’t read carefully enough and I have to spell things out.
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That conversation got long-winded and self indulgent. Nobody cares about where anybody went to school. The name calling and cussing at each other is a waste of emotion and energy.The discussion is what matters.
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As for why the original newsweek article questions are irrelevant, I said that in the first page of this thread: labeling Obama as conservative or liberal does little to further the intellectual debate. The use of labels is a sophistry in order to avoid true analyses and discussion. I’ve also stated that the foreign policies of both candidates is deficient when it comes to the islamofacism threat so further labeling is useless.
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First about labels:
On this I disagree with you. I think that often the labels are good as thumbnails. They have a lot of utility. Hence, why they are used. You do have a fair point with regard to the limits of their utility. (Two of) Our biggest capitalist competitors are “socialist” India and “communist” China. These point out that while labels can be misleading, it is more a matter of limitations of language rather than intentional deception. I think that the thrust of Zakarias’ article. Examples that are considered conservative are being followed by someone labeled as liberal.
About Islamofacism:
As labels go this one seems problematic. It has the difficulty of referencing some old conquering powers. The Germans invaded Belgium for totally different reasons than those used by Islamic terrorists. Most terrorists or resistance fighters seem themselves as fighters of oppression. Thats true of the IRA as well as groups like Hamas. They are trying to maximize effect while minimizing there use of warfare resources. The IRA achieved this by blowing up any building the foreign press stayed in. Rogue states are different but they function on a similar logic. More on this later.
[quote=surveyor]
There is also a difference between calling him dumb (which I’ve never said) and calling him uninformed, which is a legitimate criticism.
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The uninformed part is of course subjective. Some of the suggestions that would indicate ignorance on his part don’t fly. I find it less than plausible that a native Hawaiian who went to college in the US (and high school in Honolulu) does not have basic familiarity with the largest military action in Hawaiian history. I also find it unlikely that he is ignorant (or uninformed) when we consider that he graduated with honors as an international relations student and now serves on the Committee on Foreign relations and the Subcommitte on European affairs. The criticism from Bolton, which I address below, is more about a specific set of quotes and implications for future action that he (correctly) draws from those quotes.
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Anyways, I thought that this article (which I am bringing back again…) was a good article showing how Obama’s lack of knowledge towards history can hurt him when creating foreign policy or even getting the right lesson from history.
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Since you do not wish to go back through the thread, here it is:
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[quote=surveyor] Barack Obama’s willingness to meet with the leaders of rogue states such as Iran and North Korea “without preconditions” is a naive and dangerous approach to dealing with the hard men who run pariah states. It will be an important and legitimate issue for policy debate during the remainder of the presidential campaign.
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Not sure about that first assertion but he was dead on about the controversy.
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Consider his facile observations about President Kennedy’s first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in Vienna in 1961. Obama saw it as a meeting that helped win the Cold War, when in fact it was an embarrassment for the American side. The inexperienced Kennedy performed so poorly that Khrushchev may well have been encouraged to position Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, thus precipitating one of the Cold War’s most dangerous crises.
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Thats a tremendous stretch. I think Robert McNamara would disagree. Or rather he does disagree. And he has met with the actors involved in the crisis. He was one.
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Such realities should cause Obama to become more circumspect, minimizing his off-the-cuff observations about history, grand strategy and diplomacy. In fact, he has done exactly the opposite, exhibiting so many gaps in his knowledge and understanding of world affairs that they have not yet received the attention they deserve. He consistently reveals failings in foreign policy that are far more serious than even his critics had previously imagined.
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The problem is that we have still not established the “realities” that Mr. Bolton is referring to. One cannot take away a hard lesson from something that does not appear to be real. Bolton’s views are considered controversial and extreme in most IR circles.
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Consider the following statement, which was lost in the controversy over his comments about negotiations: “Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. … Iran, they spend 1/100th of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance.”
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Let’s dissect this comment. Obama is correct that the rogue states he names do not present the same magnitude of threat as that posed by the Soviet Union through the possibility of nuclear war. Fortunately for us all, general nuclear war never took place. Nonetheless, serious surrogate struggles between the superpowers abounded because the Soviet Union’s threat to the West was broader and more complex than simply the risk of nuclear war. Subversion, guerrilla warfare, sabotage and propaganda were several of the means by which this struggle was waged, and the stakes were high, even, or perhaps especially, in “tiny” countries.
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In the Western Hemisphere, for example, the Soviets used Fidel Castro’s Cuba to assist revolutionary activities in El Salvador and Nicaragua. In Western Europe, vigorous Moscow-directed communist parties challenged the democracies on their home turfs. In Africa, numerous regimes depended on Soviet military assistance to stay in power, threaten their neighbors or resist anti-communist opposition groups.
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Both sides in the Cold War were anxious to keep these surrogate struggles from going nuclear, so the stakes were never “civilizational.” But to say that these “asymmetric” threats were “tiny” would be news to those who struggled to maintain or extend freedom’s reach during the Cold War.
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Bolton has a point that small countries matter greatly in the gamesmanship between superpowers. However, the point of what Obama seemed to be saying was that we are militarily stronger and it does not do us any good to keep these small countries as seething enemies.
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Had Italy, for example, gone communist during the 1950s or 1960s, it would have been an inconvenient defeat for the United States but a catastrophe for the people of Italy. An “asymmetric” threat to the U.S. often is an existential threat to its friends, which was something we never forgot during the Cold War. Obama plainly seems to have entirely missed this crucial point. Ironically, it is he who is advocating a unilateralist policy, ignoring the risks and challenges to U.S. allies when the direct threat to us is, in his view, “tiny.”
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Countries don’t “go” communist. Typically either they have an unstable gov’t which sees a popular revolution (eg: Iran and Cuba) or they get invaded.
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What is implicit in Obama’s reference to “tiny” threats is that they are sufficiently insignificant that negotiations alone can resolve them. Indeed, he has gone even further, arguing that the lack of negotiations with Iran caused the threats: “And the fact that we have not talked to them means that they have been developing nuclear weapons, funding Hamas, funding Hezbollah.”
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While implications are subjective, I disagree with Mr. Bolton’s assessment. Negotiations are a starting point for getting what you want. We have never tried this with either Iran or Cuba. We undermined democracy in both countries and then were shocked when our puppet governments were taken down and more popular (though evil) regimes installed. Talking would not hurt our current stalemate. Mr. Bolton has to reach back to Kennedy for an (unconvincing) example of diplomacy harming our interests. Reagan’s negotiations with Gorbachev were instrumental in dealing with a much bigger country. They achieved our aims where all the “tiny” country actions failed. If negotiations fail we will have lost nothing from where we are now.
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This is perhaps the most breathtakingly naive statement of all, implying as it does that it is actually U.S. policy that motivates Iran rather than Iran’s own perceived ambitions and interests. That would be news to the mullahs in Tehran, not to mention the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah.
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[quote=surveyor]
It is an article of faith for Obama, and many others on the left in the U.S. and abroad, that it is the United States that is mostly responsible for the world’s ills. In 1984, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick labeled people with these views the “San Francisco Democrats,” after the city where Walter Mondale was nominated for president.
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The points of Ms. K are well taken. Wasting time agonizing how our government is evil is a fruitless exercise.
This is why she was instead a constructive voice and was instrumental in help with Reagan’s foreign policy (which was characterized by engagement).
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Most famously, Kirkpatrick forever seared the San Francisco Democrats by saying that “they always blame America first” for the world’s problems. In so doing, she turned the name of the pre-World War II isolationist America First movement into a stigma the Democratic Party has never shaken.
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As liberal democrat from San Francisco this is just a wasteful name-calling exercise. This was dull the first time I heard it at age 12.
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This is yet another piece of history that Obama has ignored or never learned. There may be one more piece of history worthy of attention: In 1984, Mondale went down to one of the worst electoral defeats in American political history. We will now see whether Obama follows that path as well.
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Obama is not a given as a presidential contender. However, he is a strong candidate. Mondale was always pretty weak.
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John R. Bolton is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
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In the future your posts would be stronger if you used articles or opinion pieces by respected thinkers on these topics. John Bolton is not respected by most people who work in foreign affairs. That includes the Republicans and most conservative thinkers. His public comments that the UN is an irrelevant institution mean that he is seen as an extremist in his field. That is part of the reason he could not get confirmed by a Republican congress.
