I shudder to think ........... but Ambassador Bolton lays it out in the January issue of Commentary magazine, and it is bleak. As bad as Bolton paints it, global governance being the cornerstone of American defeat, I predict it will be worse than even Bolton describes.
First, Obama has no particular interest in foreign and national-security
policy. That is not what he has spent his professional and political career,
such as it is, doing, and it is not where his passions lie. There can be no
question that the challenges of remaking America’s health-care, financial, and
energy-production systems claim the bulk of Obama’s attention.
Second, Obama does not see the rest of the world as dangerous or threatening
to America. He has made it clear by his actions as president that he does not
want to engage in a “global war against terrorism.” The rising power of other
nations, creeds, and ideologies, however unsavory, pose no grievous challenge to
which the United States must rise. We are not at a Dean Acheson–style,
post–World War II “present at the creation” moment. Therefore, Obama reasons,
why behave in reactive, outmoded ways when there are many more interesting and
pressing domestic projects to nurture?
Obama’s America need only be restrained, patient, and deferential. Take, for
example, Obama’s November 2009 trip to China, during which the media highlighted
how unyielding Beijing was, thus confirming their “rising China/declining
America” conventional wisdom. In fact, it was more Obama’s submissiveness and
less China’s assertiveness that made the difference on issue after issue: trade
policy and Chinese currency manipulation; Taiwan; Beijing’s unwillingness to
limit growth for the sake of global-warming theory; and Iranian and North Korean
nuclear-weapons programs. Obama repeatedly came away empty-handed, even on
blatantly cosmetic aspects of the visit: where he would speak, to whom, and how
it would be broadcast.
Third, Obama’s vision is embedded in a carapace of naive internationalism, a
very comfortable fit when national security is neither that interesting nor that
important. Obama is the first president since December 7, 1941, to espouse a
determinedly unassertive global role for the United States, one ironically
verging on an essentially neo-isolationist view of America. Obama’s December 1
announcement of troop increases in Afghanistan is not to the contrary, since he
proclaimed the beginning of withdrawal in virtually the same breath.
Afghanistan, like Iraq, is the very paradigm of legacy issues Obama does not
want to confront. Failures such as his Middle East peace process and dealing
with Iran and North Korea have simply led to resignation and
inattention.
However, Obama’s is not your grandfather’s isolationism. He focuses not on
America’s virtues but on why it is ordinary (thus explaining why, as I have
written elsewhere, he is firmly “post-American”).1 It is America’s ordinariness that should enjoin it from
imposing its will upon other nations. Obama is our first sitting president to
express this sentiment. In April, he articulated this point with absolute
clarity. Asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, the president
responded, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the
Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek
exceptionalism.” In other words, “No.”
In this vein, the boundless naïveté in the president’s UN speeches abundantly
demonstrate Woodrow Wilson’s patrimony. In September, he said to the UN General
Assembly:
It is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009—more than at any point in
human history—the interests of nations and peoples are shared. . . . In an era when our destiny
is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try
to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group or
people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will
hold.
In 1916, Wilson said that “the interests of all nations are also our own,”
and later advocated “peace without victory.” He said, “There must be, not a
balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an
organized common peace” founded on “the moral force of the public opinion of the
world.” If you removed the dates from these two sets of comments, most people
would have to guess which was Obama’s and which was Wilson’s.
Through these prisms—Obama’s focus on domestic issues, his belief in the
absence of major international threats, and his fascination with multilateralism
for its own sake—we can project forward the president’s foreign policy.
Conveniently for Obama, pushing his priorities will involve international
negotiations where presidential authority is virtually exclusive. That does not
mean, of course, that he can determine the final outcome where congressional
action such as Senate treaty ratification is required, but Obama and his
negotiators will be able to dominate in crafting the agreements themselves.
Three policy areas loom large and will allow Obama to showcase, in various
combinations, the three core characteristics of his worldview.
The first policy on the table will almost certainly be American arms
reduction, achieved through budget decisions and arms-control agreements, both
bilateral agreements with Russia and multilateral pacts with other nations. At a
time of profligate federal spending, only the Department of Defense’s budget is
constrained. With economic stimulus all the rage, Obama has rejected enlarging
the standing military; decided against increasing defense procurement to
replenish the weapons and other equipment consumed by wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan; and stalled progress on critical high-tech military systems. These
expenditures (and others) are central to future power-projection capabilities,
and all would result in tangible assets and greater policy options, in contrast
with the pathetic “shovel-ready” programs of the actual stimulus. This disparity
is not accidental.
Even worse, both Obama’s Prague speech on a nuclear-weapons-free world and
the first U.S. Nuclear Posture Review since 2001, heavily determined by the
White House, point toward unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United States,
whatever the success of international negotiations. The president believes
strongly, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that lowering U.S. nuclear
capabilities toward zero will induce would-be proliferators around the
world—Iran and North Korea take note—to give up their own nuclear-weapons
programs. This is what Obama means by “strengthening” the regime established by
the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and what Gordon Brown has already proposed
in giving up one of Great Britain’s four nuclear-missile
submarines.
On several occasions in 2009, Obama and Russian President Medvedev announced
agreements on future dramatic cuts in both nations’ nuclear arsenals and
strategic delivery systems. Obama has already unilaterally reduced U.S. efforts
in the missile-defense field, and there is every prospect of returning to some
version of an antiballistic missile treaty. The Russians, of course, are
delighted to agree to these reductions. For even if the international price of
oil were again to rise dramatically, Russia would remain incapable of sustaining
its nuclear forces anywhere near U.S. levels. “Mutual and balanced” reductions
thus commit Russia merely to their most optimistic projections of their own
capabilities and serve essentially to restrain the United States. In fact,
“equal” levels severely and disproportionately disadvantage the United States
because of our obligations to provide nuclear umbrellas for NATO, Japan, and
others. Russia has no comparable need.
Multilaterally, Obama has been even more activist, enshrining his objectives
in Security Council Resolution 1887 (indeed, even chairing the council session
that adopted it) and convening a global summit on “nuclear security” in 2010.
Obama has promised U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which
was actually defeated by majority vote in the Senate in 1999). He has pledged to
renew negotiations for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty as well as a treaty for
the prevention of an arms race in space. He favors creating and strengthening
so-called nuclear-free zones around the world and has urged all states not
already party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to join as
non-nuclear-weapons states, meaning that Israel, Pakistan, and India would have
to give up their nuclear weapons (which won’t happen in any of their cases).
Finally, Secretary of State Clinton promised active U.S. involvement in drafting
an Arms Trade Treaty for conventional weapons, which is a thinly disguised route
to achieve domestic gun-control objectives long blocked in the normal
legislative process.
All these objectives will meet fierce domestic opposition in the Senate and
elsewhere. But make no mistake; Obama knows where he wants to go and is working
hard to get there.
Obama’s second leading policy concern is international agreement on global
warming. This is not the place to re-debate global warming, but the
climate-change True Believers clearly see little appeal in anything less than
statist, command-and-control direction of global behavior. Obama’s efforts will
draw the U.S. more fully into this fold.
Political reality may have doomed the possibility of a full-up treaty to
replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2009, but that setback has not dimmed Obama’s
multilateral enthusiasm. Environmentalists have focused blame for the absence of
a legally binding treaty on the United States, as Congress is unable to enact
cap-and-trade in Obamamania’s first year. In response, Obama will likely move
more aggressively in multilateral negotiations to create a successor to Kyoto
despite congressional inaction. In so doing, he will be following a now familiar
strategy for American leftists, which is to internationalize problems on which
they cannot make progress domestically. They have attempted in recent decades,
with varying degrees of success, to do so on a host of issues: gun control, the
death penalty, abortion, and the “rights of the child” among
them.
The strategy is to reach agreement with like-minded leaders of other
countries, whose governments are likely to be far to the Left of America’s
political center of gravity. Then, treaty or other international agreement in
hand, activists return to the Senate to announce that the rest of the world is
determined to do “X” and that America cannot allow itself to be “isolated” along
with Somalia, Burma, China, or other assorted holdouts. Thus, on global warming,
Obama will likely focus on international approaches to reach his goals, perhaps
using executive agreements rather than treaties to bypass the Senate and
domestic political roadblocks. Similarly, he will increase efforts to ratify the
Law of the Sea Treaty, which global-warming activists are touting as a backdoor
to increasing environmental regulation.
Third—both enabling and following from the first two foreign-policy
imperatives—“global governance” and “international law” will become growth
industries under Obama. To the UN Security Council, Obama said, “The world must
stand together. And we must demonstrate that international law is not an empty
promise, and that treaties will be enforced.” This dovetails nicely with the
sentiments of the incoming president of the European Union, former Belgian Prime
Minister Herman Van Rompuy, who made clear in his November 19 acceptance speech
that “2009 is also the first year of global governance with the establishment of
the G-20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in
Copenhagen is another step toward the global management of our planet.” As our
post-American President Obama well knows, the European Union is a continuing
font of ideas on global governance, always eager to share its own form of
bureaucratic control and accompanying “democratic deficit” worldwide. Now the
new European president has a rapt pupil in the Oval Office and acolytes
scattered throughout Washington’s foreign-policy establishment.
In many respects, the renunciation of “torture” in interrogating captured
terrorists, the commitment to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay,
and the criminal trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other defendants in U.S.
courts are about making sure that “international law is not an empty promise.”
These steps are, perilously, also decisions about retreating from a war paradigm
to a law-enforcement paradigm in dealing with terrorism. But it was not
coincidental that Obama’s first applause line in the General Assembly came when
he referred to renouncing “torture” and shutting down Gitmo.
There is much more global governance in the works. The Obama administration
sought and won re-election to the new UN Human Rights Council, a body that the
Bush administration voted against creating in 2006 and that it subsequently
refused to join. The new council has proved itself just as antithetical to
American interests as was its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission, but
mentioning yet another reversal of Bush policy won Obama a further round of
applause in the General Assembly.
There will undoubtedly be more such applause to come. Secretary Clinton has
committed to ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention
on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Whatever the pros and
cons of these agreements, the larger question is how much “law” the Obama
administration is prepared to make outside the ever growing U.S. Code we already
possess. To Obama’s internationalist sensibility, the offense, of course, is
that laws “made in the U.S.A.” by freely elected representatives of our own
citizenry are too “exceptional” and too “parochial” to hold weight in this
interconnected world. Mere “municipal” laws, as international-law scholars refer
to them, don’t pass John Kerry’s “global test” of legitimacy for American
foreign policy. President Obama clearly wants to fix that
problem.
Secretary Clinton opined, in Nairobi last summer, that it was “a great regret
but it is a fact we are not yet a signatory” to the Rome Statute, which created
the International Criminal Court. So it was no surprise when the State
Department confirmed on November 16 that the United States will now participate
as an observer in meetings of the court’s members. Observer status is manifestly
a step toward the administration’s ill-disguised ultimate objective of
re-signing the Rome Statute, ratifying it, and becoming a full member of the
court. Obviously, all these and other steps have implications not only for the
United States but also for close allies like Israel, which were protected by
earlier U.S. opposition.
Barack Obama’s blueprint for the United States spells trouble for American
autonomy, self-governance, and defense, all key elements of national
sovereignty. His undisguised indifference to repeated diminutions of that
sovereignty is entirely consistent with the views of his European admirers, who,
at their level, would like to see their nation-states dissolve into the European
Union. In the end, however, the United States is exceptional and will not melt
into any larger or global union; it will simply become less able to protect
itself and its constitutional decision-making system. That is clearly where our
first post-American president’s policies will take us.
HMS Vanguard is Britain's lead Trident-armed submarine. The US, under a nuclear deal, has agreed to give the Kremlin the serial numbers of the missiles it gives Britain Photo: TAM MACDONALD
