While America Slept. Robert C. O'Brien
into his administration, there can be no question that he has succeeded in his transformational aspirations. In 2016, the world is a very different place than the one that existed when Mr. Obama was elected.
President Obama took office by telling America’s adversaries in his inaugural address that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” At a NATO summit in April of the same year, he redefined traditional notions of American exceptionalism by stating: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” He told Europeans that “there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” In Turkey, he said, “[t]he United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history.” He noted that “[o]ur country still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans.” In Cairo, he claimed that “fear and anger” from 9/11 “led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals.”
President Obama, as he boasted in January 2012, personally guided the process by which the United States massively cut its defense budget, yielding the smallest Army, Navy, and Marine Corps since before World War II. He said he would use the savings to “pay down our debt, and . . . to rebuild America.” Instead, the US budget deficit soared. I am certain he believed other nations would follow suit and engage in their own rounds of disarmament. They did not.
President Obama’s statements and actions suggest that he may have agreed with former diplomat Francis Fukuyama, who wrote in 1989, following the collapse of Communism, that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War. . .but. . .the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” I have no doubt that President Obama truly believed that by reaching out to our adversaries with humility and concessions, by acknowledging America’s sins and minimizing her historic role as an exceptional nation, and by unilaterally and drastically reducing her defense capability, he would earn goodwill and reciprocity from those he himself had labeled “corrupt and deceitful” leaders. Instead, the autocrats, tyrants, and terrorists were emboldened. China, Russia, and Iran engaged in significant arms buildups even as America drew down, cutting into and perhaps eliminating our military edge. At the same time, by force or threat thereof, in some cases using proxies, these nations grabbed territory in the South China Sea, Eastern Europe, and across the Middle East. At the same time, a well-organized Islamic terrorist group—ISIS—established a caliphate throughout vast swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria.
President Obama’s thinking is not new. America’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, addressed it in her famous speech to the Republican National Convention in Dallas on August 20, 1984. I remember it well, as I was fortunate enough to hear it from the convention floor where I was serving as a page. She called those that looked away from Soviet aggression and Iranian terrorism and found fault instead with US policy the “blame America first crowd.” She noted the wisdom of the “American people [who] know that it’s dangerous to blame ourselves for terrible problems that we did not cause.”
As a lawyer with an international practice and as an advisor to Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Scott Walker, and Ted Cruz, my travels have taken me to regions of the world that are in turmoil. I have seen firsthand the consequences of what the Obama White House itself calls the President’s “lead from behind” foreign policy. Since President Obama was sworn in, I have been to Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, Ukraine, the Republic of Georgia, Estonia, Israel, the Persian Gulf states, and various nations in Southeast Asia and Africa. In each of these places, the fallout of what Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens describes as “America in retreat” is apparent—and it is sad.
In Afghanistan, some young Afghan patriots, who chose to side with us after the 9/11 attacks, asked me if we would abandon their country as we had abandoned Iraq. At the American naval station in Guantánamo Bay, I sat next to the family members of 9/11 victims and watched as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators were led into a civilized courtroom to be defended by the best lawyers in America for their unspeakable acts of mass murder. As they watched the perpetrators of evil carry in their prayer rugs and beads, the family members wondered: Would the terrorists ever face justice for their crimes? Would they be moved to America and be given even more rights and more lenient incarceration, or possibly, would they even be released onto our streets?
In Kiev, Ukraine, my translator, a newly minted lawyer, explained to me that he and his friends were forced to crowdsource body armor when one of their college buddies volunteered to go to the eastern front to fight Russian regulars. He asked if the United States could send some of the Kevlar vests we were no longer using in Iraq to his friends. A reasonable request, but one which we have not satisfactorily answered. The Ukrainians are willing to fight for their own freedom—but unlike freedom fighters in the past, they have little access to the arsenal of democracy.
When I monitored polls for the free and fair presidential election in the Republic of Georgia, my driver had to take us on a circuitous route away from the frontlines in South Ossetia. He did this because Russian soldiers take pot shots from time to time at Georgians who get too close to the artificial border created by Vladimir Putin. Whether it is Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltics or, now, Syria, the Russian bear is on the move and the American eagle studiously looks away.
I have stood in a Kibbutz kindergarten in Israel near the border with Gaza that was shelled with Hamas’ Qassam rockets. I saw the Hezbollah entrenchments in Southern Lebanon from a watchtower in the Golan Heights. Our Israeli hosts struggled to understand the Obama administration’s naïve hope that Iran, which sponsors both Hamas and Hezbollah, would somehow become America’s geopolitical partner in the Middle East. In what is certainly the worst diplomatic deal since Munich, President Obama has paved the way for a nuclear Iran and given the mullahs over $100 billion dollars in sanctions relief as an incentive to agree to Western appeasement.
America’s closest ally in the Gulf is Kuwait. Twenty-six years after Saddam’s invasion and occupation of their country, the people of Kuwait remain grateful to the United States and United Kingdom and to President Bush and Prime Ministers Thatcher and Major for standing up for the principle that the powerful should not be able to change their borders at the expense of the weak. Businessmen with whom I spoke were incredulous that America had supported Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood followers as they attempted a rolling coup in Egypt. When General Sisi was elected President of Egypt on a platform of rooting out Islamic extremism, Washington was indifferent at best and hostile at worst. The Gulf Arabs were truly taken aback by such an approach to the clear and present danger of radical Islamists controlling the Arab world’s largest country and its cultural hub.
In Southeast Asia and Africa, the biggest untold story of the new century is the rise of China. For example, in one small Southeast Asian country, a land that owes its very existence to Western humanitarian intervention, China built the nation’s new Ministry of Defense building. It also seeks to install powerful radar systems to track the movement of American and allied shipping in the South Pacific. Throughout Africa, from Cape Town to Addis Ababa, China is building roads and government buildings and laying fiber-optic cables. It will soon control the continent’s infrastructure, mining, and agricultural sectors and even maintain military bases in harbors that were once famous ports of call for Western navies. Over two million Chinese nationals live in Africa and some argue that Africa is undergoing a stealth recolonization, this time directed from Beijing.
I have negotiated in Beijing with senior Chinese government officials. They appear entirely confident that America and the West are in decline, and that the twenty-first century will be theirs. Whether it is in the economic, cyber, military, or political arenas, China no longer bides its time. It creates artificial islands in the South China Sea that the White House orders the US Navy to avoid. It establishes an Air Identification Zone over Japanese-administered islands in the East China Sea that foreign—including American—airlines respect. It hacks the most personal data of every American that has served in the military or government without any repercussions. And it vetoes American-led human rights initiatives in international organizations without consequence.
Bill