Israel Matzav

Victor Davis Hanson on US foreign policy

America vows not to “meddle” on behalf of Iranian dissidents, reaches out to Syria, and was initially silent in the face of Libyan atrocities — in a landscape in which we earlier declared Hosni Mubarak a dictator, and not a dictator, who should depart kinda yesterday, if he did not stay on for a transition to a military dictatorship, which might in turn oversee elections some day that might include the Muslim Brotherhood, which is sorta nonviolent and kinda secular.

In the last two years scarcely a week has gone by in which we did not in some way criticize democratic and once allied Israel. Perhaps if the Israeli government had stoned some homosexuals, or assassinated a leading Lebanese reform figure, or bombed its own cities, we might either have kept silent or publicly promised not to meddle in Israeli affairs. Or we might have apologized for something we purportedly did decades ago that offended Israeli sensibilities.

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Terrorism of the home-grown kind is now a “grave” concern, and that is why we do not use the offensive terms “Islamist” or “jihad,” and have evolved to nomenclature like “overseas contingency operations” for “war on terror” and “man-caused disasters” for “terrorism” — although one may doubt that any serious American security official has ever phoned his European counterpart to discuss joint “overseas contingency operations” against “man-caused disasters.” When jihadists strike, they do so “allegedly” until formally convicted, and the resulting American uproar and threats to diversity programs can be as serious a concern as the actual terrorist operation. Formerly one-dimensional agencies like NASA now have new expanded missions, namely, reaching out to the Muslim world.

In the theoretical sphere, we are unsure that America is any more “exceptional” than, say, Greece, since such perceptions are always relative and merely rest in the eye of the beholder. Britain certainly does not really hold a “special relationship” with the United States in the past Churchillian or Thatcherian sense. And there is a greater need to fly abroad to lobby for a Chicago Olympics than there is to visit Germany to commemorate the downfall of Communism. France, hitherto not known for having greater idealism than the United States, from time to time reminds us that centrifuges are still “spinning” in Iran.

We promised increased billions in foreign aid to our allies, much of which is borrowed from foreign bondholders, along the lines of, “Dear China, could you lend us another $2 billion at 3 percent to help Pakistan, and then please act as if the ensuing grant is really our money?” Apparently, we really must believe that America is exceptional to try to get away with that.

America is terribly worried about the volatility of the oil-exporting Middle East, and that is why we put large regions of the United States and its coasts off limits for new oil, gas, and tar-sands exploration. Apparently other countries can extract and export oil in far more environmentally sound fashion than can America, and, in any case, we have plenty of cash reserves to import at high prices.

What diagnosis might we make on the basis of such symptomology?

Labels: Barack Obama, foreign policy, Victor Davis Hanson

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:42 PM