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Mostrando postagens com marcador John Bolton. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador John Bolton. Mostrar todas as postagens

sábado, 14 de novembro de 2020

Trump Drove Latin America Into China’s Arms - Oliver Stuenkel (Foreign Affairs)

Oliver Stuenkel mostra como a política de Trump para a AL backfired, por incompetente, ideológica e puramente aventureira, como se espera de bestas quadradas...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

 

Foreign AffairsNovember/December 2020

SIGN INSUBSCRIBE

Trump Drove Latin America Into China’s Arms

Biden Has a Chance to Wrest It Back

By Oliver Stuenkel

November 13, 2020

 

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump took an aggressive approach to Latin America that has spectacularly backfired. Two years ago, John Bolton, who was then the U.S. national security adviser, dubbed the autocratic regimes of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua the “Troika of Tyranny” and confronted the three countries with crippling sanctions and menacing rhetoric. “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well,” Bolton said in April 2019, referring to the principle behind the long and traumatic history of U.S. interventions in Latin America.

The result was to unite Latin American governments of all stripes against the United States. Regional leaders, concerned about the precedent that U.S. intervention in Venezuela could set, reluctantly sided with the country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro. Even those strongly critical of Venezuela, such as Colombia, rejected all talk of military intervention, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who had made radical alignment with the United States the centerpiece of his foreign policy, found himself overruled by the country’s armed forces, which categorically oppose the presence of foreign troops in neighboring countries. The autocratic leaders of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba are still in power—in part because U.S. pressure created a rally-round-the-flag effect and helped them deflect blame onto Washington for internal woes.

Even as it failed to achieve its primary objective, the Trump administration’s policy undermined broader U.S. strategy in Latin America by strengthening China’s hand in the region. Indeed, the aggressive U.S. stance has left Latin American policymakers scrambling for partners who can balance Washington’s influence—a role that Beijing has been only too willing to play. In Venezuela, sanctions have sidelined U.S. firms, creating an ideal opening for Chinese companies to expand their influence. If the Maduro regime were to collapse, Beijing would be well positioned to assume a dominant role in the country’s reconstruction.

During the Trump presidency, China has grown more influential and more powerful in Latin America in virtually every dimension. Brazil is perhaps the most remarkable example: despite Bolsonaro’s anti-China rhetoric and his efforts to strengthen ties to Washington, Brazil’s trade with the United States has fallen to its lowest level in 11 years, while trade with China is booming. Fully 34 percent of Brazilian exports go to China, and China’s relatively quick economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic will likely lead that figure to grow.

Latin American heads of state watched closely as Trump repeatedly humiliated Bolsonaro—surprising him with tariffs on Brazilian products, for example. The lesson they drew was simple: a partnership with Washington entailed significant economic and political risk. They looked to Beijing instead: Chile’s president sought to make his country the region’s main interlocutor with China, and Argentina welcomed a Chinese military-run space station, which began operating in 2018. Of seven countries that shifted ties from Taipei to Beijing during the Trump presidency, three—the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Panama—are in Latin America. Paraguay faces growing pressure to join them. Many Latin American countries are likely to adopt Huawei’s 5G infrastructure, despite U.S. threats of unspecified “economic consequences” for those that do.

President-elect Joe Biden has an opportunity to take a more constructive approach to Beijing’s growing influence in Latin America. Doing so will require the new administration to avoid antagonizing the region’s leaders and to emphasize shared interests instead. Washington will have to counteract an ugly impression that the Trump administration has created—one that suggests the United States is driven largely by the desire to contain China rather than support the region’s economic development.

DAY ONE

The less threatening the United States appears from a Latin American perspective, the less of an urge the region’s leaders will feel to balance its influence with China’s. Trump administration officials, including former and current Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, have made frequent reference to the Monroe Doctrine. The incoming U.S. administration must explicitly distance itself from this language. Such talk was a gift to the Chinese, who defend the principle of nonintervention—a principle that Latin American governments strongly support.

Badmouthing China makes Washington look desperate to dominate and afraid to compete.

The Biden administration should make clear from day one that military intervention in Venezuela is off the table, and it should put an end to broad sanctions that immiserate the country’s citizens. Even Venezuelans who despise Maduro largely oppose the U.S. sanctions, which have caused vast human suffering in a region where millions of people are already sliding back into poverty because of the pandemic. The United States should calibrate sanctions to hurt only those who assure Maduro’s hold on power. It should do the same in Nicaragua and Cuba, because whatever Latin Americans may think about the regime in Havana, broad sanctions fuel anti-Americanism in the region and make China’s life easier.

A POSITIVE AGENDA

Latin American policymakers are far more likely to be influenced by constructive U.S. policies toward their countries than by negative U.S. rhetoric about China. Trade with China has had many positive economic consequences for Latin America over the past two decades, and the United States sounds patronizing and dishonest when it seeks to dissuade the region’s leaders from sustaining these relations. Such meddling is counterproductive—even when the United States has genuinely relevant concerns, such as those about the inequality of a trade relationship that has Latin America mainly selling commodities to China and buying value-added goods in return, or about the risks that Huawei telecommunications infrastructure may pose to privacy.

The Biden administration should instruct its ambassadors and officials not to speak about Chinese–Latin American relations in public at all. Badmouthing China, rather than promoting U.S. strengths, makes Washington look desperate to dominate and afraid to compete. A Central American diplomat once privately told me that when U.S. officials complain about China in Latin America, “they sound like a jealous ex-boyfriend.”

The United States should instead lay out a positive agenda on matters of common concern across the region. Some of these pertain to other regions as well: the United States under Biden should of course return to the World Health Organization and adopt more generous policies to help poor countries gain access to masks, ventilators, and vaccines against COVID-19. Such measures will go a long way in countering China’s growing influence in Latin America.

Biden will need particular diplomatic skill to deal with Bolsonaro.

In Latin America in particular, Washington should emphasize and deepen its work with local partners to promote human rights, protect the environment, and strengthen civil society. It should be an ally in the region’s fight against corruption and a source of economic aid at the current moment of profound crisis. A constructively engaged United States can convene regional discussions to help tackle drug trafficking and transnational crime, which victimizes hundreds of thousands of young Latin Americans every year.

PRESIDENTIAL DIPLOMACY

U.S. presidential diplomacy could go a long way toward overcoming the region’s polarities, and Biden may be particularly well suited for such an enterprise. He is unusually knowledgeable about Latin America for a U.S. president-elect, and his moderate, pragmatic style may allow him to establish a meaningful rapport with leaders from the left (Bolivia, Mexico, Argentina), through the center-right (Colombia, Chile, Uruguay), to the far right (Brazil). Dialogue in the region has all but broken down in recent years: President Bolsonaro has so far refused to speak to his Argentine counterpart, and Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has yet to visit a single Latin American country. Only if and when these leaders resume a constructive dialogue will the region be able to address its most urgent problems, such as migration from Venezuela and Central America, environmental degradation in Brazil, transnational crime, and a poverty rate nearing 40 percent.

Biden will need particular diplomatic skill to deal with Bolsonaro. The self-styled “Trump of the Tropics” repeatedly attacked the Democratic candidate during the campaign because of his comments about deforestation in the Amazon. Biden’s task will be to get Brazil to adopt more stringent environmental rules—but to do so without pushing it into the arms of China, which is careful never to criticize Brazil’s controversial environmental policies, and without issuing public threats, which Bolsonaro uses to mobilize his radical followers.

No matter how much U.S. diplomacy improves under Biden, trade between China and Latin America is almost certain to continue growing, and China will therefore consolidate some influence on the continent. Economic ties to China may help to mitigate the worst of the coming recession in Latin America, even if it can’t be staved off altogether. Nonetheless, Washington has an opportunity to become a far more trusted and influential partner to Latin America than it has been under President Trump. The new administration should seize the moment as the region charts its geopolitical course.

 

sexta-feira, 11 de outubro de 2019

Aventuras da diplomacia olavo-bolsonarista: a "derrocada" do ditador da Venezuela

O falcão recentemente demitido da diplomacia trumpista, desastrado como sempre foi, tinha vindo ao Brasil em dezembro, para se encontrar com o presidente eleito e seu chanceler acidental. Aproveitou um café com leite condensado para convencer o presidente eleito e seu chanceler secundário (ou terciário) de que bastaria um pequeno gesto para derrubar o ditador chavista-bolivariano.
O novo chanceler se atirou com tal entusiasmo ao projeto que, além de aprovar uma base americana no Brasil, logo no dia 1o. de janeiro, diretamente para o Secretário de Estado presente na posse (o que foi prontamente, imediatamente rechaçado pelos militares do governo), também seguiu imediatamente o anúncio, pelo mesmo Secretário de Estado, de reconhecimento do "presidente paralelo" da Venezuela, 50 minutos depois, ainda em Davos. 
Depois, um mês mais tarde,  tentou aprovar o ingresso de militares e equipamentos americanos no Brasil, para forçar a ajuda humanitária na fronteira brasileira de Roraima, e mais uma vez foi barrado pelos militares sensatos. O vice-presidente chegou a liderar a segunda reunião do Grupo de Lima, para barrar esse aventureirismo trumpista em nossa política externa, rechaçando claramente qualquer aventura militar ou golpista na Venezuela.
Mas teve vários outros episódios, sempre vinculados à agenda do falcão americano, que ainda serão esclarecidos por uma pesquisa mais cuidadosa.
O homem se foi, e ficaram seus sócios no Brasil sem mestres em Washington. Estão tristes?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida


John Bolton Tried to Unseat a Dictator. He Failed.
Nicolás Maduro remains in power despite U.S. sanctions and attempts to oust him. There’s no more room for improvisation.
Jorge G. Castañeda
The New York Times – 9.11.2019

During John Bolton’s recently ended tenure as national security adviser, he convinced President Trump that the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was on the verge of losing power. Mr. Bolton is reported to have been the architect of the several failed attempts to unseat President Maduro, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s bluster.
We now know that Mr. Maduro’s fall was not imminent. Instead, Mr. Bolton bluffed on the high-ranking military officials who were about to betray Mr. Maduro; he bluffed on the number of people who would take to the streets in April to try to overthrow the Maduro regime; and he also seemed to believe that sanctions would work very quickly. Most important, though, his biggest mistake was to proceed along those lines without any Plan B in case this Plan A did not work. In the end, he has succeeded only in making Mr. Maduro stronger.
The best proof of this foreign policy debacle is that last week, for the first time since January, Mr. Maduro traveled abroad, choosing Moscow, logically enough, as his destination. He also achieved his first diplomatic victory in years last week at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, persuading enough countries, including China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran and Mexico, to vote for a resolution to promote a peaceful solution the Venezuelan crisis without foreign interference, which should be taken with a grain of salt coming from Mr. Maduro. He was, however, forced to accept the creation of a fact-finding mission to investigate the most egregious human rights abuses in Venezuela. This setback will come back to haunt him.
Mr. Maduro also pulled out of talks with the opposition in Barbados without serious consequences, another sign of his resilience. Washington’s lack of a Plan B has allowed the Venezuelan dictator to outlast his foreign and domestic opponents. This is almost reminiscent of the Bay of Pigs.
Today, Mr. Maduro appears to be further from being ousted than he was a year ago. Despite the steady flow of refugees out of the country — which has already topped four million — and a crumbling economy, the Venezuelan dictatorship persists. The question now is if a new way forward can finally be forged by the so-called Lima Group of Latin American democracies opposed to Mr. Maduro, the European Union, Washington and the United Nations human rights system.
The diplomatic approach toward Venezuela should be thoughtful, systematic and patient. Plan B would consist in staying the course, continue mounting pressure and refraining from generating false expectations because of impatience or bureaucratic infighting. No more shooting from the hip or improvisation.
The sanctions regime imposed by the United States, mainly on oil-related transactions, financial or otherwise, needs to be strengthened if they are to be effective. The European Union must also do its share on sanctions, and the union’s new foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, should not waver. It is one thing for Norway to sponsor talks between the opposition and Mr. Maduro’s regime; it is another for the Europeans to get cold feet and accept Mr. Maduro’s grip on power despite the widespread human rights violations by and clear illegality of his government.
The investigation of those violations, in Geneva and at the Organization of American States, must conducted with vigor. A devastating report by the United Nations human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, found more than 6,000 extrajudicial executions in the past five years in Venezuela; the fact-finding mission should do its job as expeditiously as possible, in spite of Mr. Maduro’s reluctance. There need to be more specific case studies, more precise denunciations and more individualized responsibilities for human rights violations.
In September, 16 of the 19 nations that are signatories of the Rio Treaty, a regional security compact, voted to impose additional economic sanctions on Mr. Maduro and his associates. Colombia, which led the initiative, has to present a better case for its claims that Mr. Maduro is protecting armed groups within its territory, than outdated or uncredited photographs taken in Colombia.
Venezuela poses a real threat to regional peace and security, and further sanctions should be applied as a result of the vote. The Rio Treaty was never a great idea, but it can be used to enforce more sanctions short of a military action.
Lastly, if serious economic difficulties are once again besieging Cuba, a country on which Mr. Maduro’s survival depends entirely, for security and intelligence reasons, Havana should be enticed or pressured into understanding that he has to go. It probably will never accept some type of quid pro quo, but nothing is lost in trying. Mr. Bolton forgot this “minor” detail: Without a carrot and stick approach for Cuba, there is no reason for Havana to be helpful. Raúl Castro, who is still first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and the island strongman, knows Mr. Maduro will not last forever; the question is when he is willing to jump from a melting iceberg to another.
Several Latin American presidents recently urged Moscow and Beijing to cooperate with their efforts and stop supporting the Venezuelan regime with money and vetoes at the United Nations Security Council. They could perhaps be most useful in convincing the Cubans that though the jig is up, there could still be something in it for them if they contribute to Mr. Maduro’s departure and the scheduling of prompt, free and internationally supervised elections.
Mr. Trump knows all about quid pro quos, even if Mr. Bolton did not. For all the wrong reasons, the American president has gained leverage over Havana by rolling back almost all of Barack Obama’s normalization. Now he should use it.

Jorge G. Castañeda, Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003, is a professor at New York University and a contributing opinion writer.

PS.: Grato Pedro Luiz Rodrigues pela transcrição e envio da matéria.

sábado, 20 de abril de 2019

Venezuela: embaixador russo rejeita a nova versão da doutrina Monroe de John Bolton (AP)

Putin envoy in Caracas rejects US revival of Monroe Doctrine

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — As Venezuela’s reliance on Russia grows amid the country’s unfolding crisis, Vladimir Putin’s point man in Caracas is pushing back on the U.S. revival of a doctrine used for generations to justify military interventions in the region.
In a rare interview, Russian Ambassador Vladimir Zaemskiy rejected an assertion this week by U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton that the 1823 Monroe Doctrine is “alive and well.”
The policy, originally aimed at opposing any European meddling in the hemisphere, was used to justify U.S. military interventions in countries including Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Grenada, but had been left for dead by recent U.S. administrations trying to turn the page on a dark past.
“It’s hard to believe that the U.S. administration have invented a time machine that not only allows them to turn back the clock but also the direction of the universe,” the 66-year-old diplomat told The Associated Press this week.
In an example of how the Cold War-like rhetoric on all sides of Venezuela’s crisis has quickly escalated, the ambassador compared hostile comments by Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio to those of the al Qaeda leaders behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“Their obsession in imposing their will, in this case on Venezuela’s internal affairs, reminds me of the declarations of the leaders of al Qaeda, who in carrying out the attack on the Twin Towers also tried to position themselves as the only bearers of the truth,” said Zaemskiy, who was senior counselor at Russia’s mission to the United Nations on 9/11. “The history of humanity has shown that none of us are.”
Those specific, written remarks were prepared ahead of the interview.
While the Trump administration led a chorus of some 50 nations that in January recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s rightful leader, Putin has steadfastly stood by Nicolás Maduro, sending planeloads of military personnel and blocking condemnation of his government at the U.N. Security Council.
In a speech this week commemorating the anniversary of the disastrous CIA-organized invasion of Cuba in 1961 by exiles opposed to Fidel Castro’s revolution, Bolton warned Russia against deploying military assets to “prop up” Maduro, considering such actions a violation of the Monroe Doctrine.
What the U.S. considers Russia’s destabilizing support for Maduro hit a high point in December when two Russian bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons touched down in Caracas. Then, last month, dozens of uniformed personnel arrived to service Sukhoi fighter jets and an S-300 missile system.
Zaemskiy said such military cooperation is perfectly legal and has been taking place for years — ever since the U.S. in 2006 banned all arms sales to the South American country. But he said the alliance has taken on added importance as the Trump administration repeatedly insists that a “military option” to remove Maduro remains on the table.
He was unwilling to say how far Russia would go to thwart an eventual U.S. attack, saying that as a diplomat he’s an optimist.
“I firmly believe that in the end reason will prevail and no tragedy will take place,” he said.
The soft-spoken, bookish Zaemskiy has specialized in Latin America since his days working for the Soviet Union and was posted to Washington for the first of two U.S. tours when the Cold War ended.
Because of his strong Spanish and English, he was a note-taker at the U.N. in September 2000 when Maduro’s mentor and predecessor Hugo Chavez met Putin for the first time. He said he recalls Chavez complaining to the newly elected Putin about the need to raise oil prices, then near three-decade low. The two petroleum powers gradually cemented a political, military and economic alliance over the next few years as oil prices surged to an all-time high, bringing riches to both.
Western diplomats describe Zaemskiy as an astute and affable interlocutor who even U.S. diplomats and leaders of the opposition are known to consult. He’s also the dean of foreign diplomats in Caracas’ dwindling diplomatic community, having presented his credentials in September 2009 — a few weeks before another staunch government ally, Cuban Ambassador Rogelio Polanco.
The aquamarine-colored Russian Embassy, where Zaemskiy also lives, was a mid-century mansion purchased in the 1970s from a wealthy military colonel trained in the U.S. It lies in the shadow the hilltop U.S. Embassy, whose flagpole has been bare since the last American diplomats pulled out of the country last month amid a feud with Maduro over its recognition of Guaidó.
He acknowledged that with hyperinflation raging and many goods in short supply, Venezuela is in a “very difficult” situation. Echoing Maduro, he blamed U.S. sanctions, as well as the stifling of private investment.
His first tour in Venezuela as a protocol officer came from 1976 to 1979, when modern skyscrapers paid for by a flood of petrodollars transformed Caracas’ skyline even as many outside the capital lived in what he described as a semi-feudal state. Zaemskiy said the legacy of Chavez’s economic and political revolution — that it restored dignity to the poor — remains intact.
“It’s perfectly clear to me that the economic situation of the country has deteriorated a great deal,” he said. “The way forward is to open more opportunities for the private sector, which still has a big role to play in the country and should be allowed to demonstrate that” — seemingly a veiled criticism of Maduro’s constant squeeze on private businesses.
To break the current stalemate, he urged something the government’s foes have so far rejected: burying the past and starting negotiations, perhaps with the mediation of the Vatican or U.N.
The U.S. and opposition insist that past attempts at dialogue have only served to give Maduro badly needed political oxygen while producing no progress.
“The lack of confidence is a problem on both sides, which is why they should think together on some innovative ways to create reassurances in this process,” he said. “To simply reject the possibility of dialogue and repeat that the only way forward is the ‘end of usurpation’ as the opposition says, won’t lead anywhere.”
Despite such outward care for Maduro, some have questioned the depth of Russia’s support.
Russia is major investor in Venezuela’s oil industry, but those interests have been jeopardized since the Trump administration in January imposed sanctions on state-run oil giant PDVSA and even went after a Moscow-based bank for facilitating its transactions. At the same time PDVSA last month moved its European headquarters to Moscow from Lisbon, Gazprombank said it was pulling out of a joint venture with the company, Russian state media reported.
“The core value of Russia’s association with Chavismo is a challenge to U.S. prerogatives in its supposed backyard,” said Ivan Briscoe, the head in Latin American for the Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. “That said, Russian diplomacy is nothing if not realistic. They know Venezuela is plunging into an economic abyss with tragic humanitarian consequences. When the moment comes and tensions reach a height, they are likely to help negotiate a settlement, but will aim to exact the highest price they can.”
___
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Copyright © 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.

terça-feira, 6 de setembro de 2011

O Imperio Diminuido - John Bolton

Um hiperconservador republicano, aliás um falcão -- desses que quase desapareceram com o fim da Guerra Fria -- desmantela, pedra por pedra, a política externa (se existe alguma) de Obama.
Nada de muito surpreendente, vindo de quem vem, mas é sempre bom examinar o que pensam alguns republicanos da diplomacia "kindler and gentler" de Obama.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

The Innocents Abroad: Obama's Foreign Policy Is Characterized
 
This article appears in the September 19th issue of the National Review
 
 
Barack Obama's badly flawed worldview and the incoherent foreign policy flowing from it have now disintegrated. Within the past few months, his media acolytes notwithstanding, the evidence has become conclusive: Obama's presidency is gravely wounding America and its friends. His response to virtually every significant threat or crisis has either complicated or worsened the problem, or, at best, left it essentially no closer to resolution.
Obama has repeatedly highlighted his propensity to apologize for America's past transgressions (as he defines them), and his disinclination to be assertive on our behalf. Indeed, so radically different is Obama from any prior American president that many observers have concluded that he has a comprehensive plan, and that somewhere in all that mess there must be a doctrine. Others look not for a plan, but for a plot; pop psychology and conspiracy theories abound as to why Obama is so comfortable, even enthusiastic, about American decline.
But it is folly to look for rhyme and reason when there is neither. For better or worse, there is no single dispositive flaw in Obama's doctrine, since there is little that resembles a doctrine. His saunter through world affairs is unstructured. Instead, the explanation for his policy's failure, and its well-deserved collapse now unfolding before us, lies in a jumbled mix of philosophy, political priorities, and personal inadequacy. Like Obama's presidency generally, his national-security flaws combine ideology, naïveté, weakness, lack of leadership, intellectual laziness, and a near-religious faith in negotiation for its own sake.
Perhaps most significantly, Obama is simply not interested in foreign and defense policy. To state such a proposition about a U.S. president seems counterintuitive or even shocking, but Obama is different from all of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat, since Franklin Roosevelt. His first thought on awakening each morning is not about threats to America, its global interests, and its friends and allies, but about his efforts to radically restructure our economy and society. That is where his intellect and his heart are focused, and his lack of attention to the rest of the world is palpable. When Obama has no other choice but to concentrate on international affairs--such as during the Afghanistan surge or the killing of Osama bin Laden--he will do so, but only for as long as is necessary to address the immediate problem before him.
So what emerges from a president who is basically uninterested in foreign affairs, who doesn't see our manifold threats and challenges as worthy of presidential time and energy, who repeatedly stresses devotion to negotiations that are divorced from their substantive outcome, and who believes that multilateral fora rather than American resolve and power can address foreign problems?
In those few national-security areas where Obama does his homework, a second characteristic predominates: He simply does not see much occurring internationally that threatens American interests. Such a benign view of a chaotic world may be even more shocking than his general lack of interest, but it is yet another reflection of his underlying intellectual laziness. He is most politely described as credulous and inexperienced, especially for someone who lived overseas as a child. During both the 2008 campaign and his presidency, for example, Obama has downplayed the very concept of a "global war on terror," treated nuclear proliferation as a side issue, and ignored the enormous strategic threats posed by a rising China and a belligerent Russia. American decline, most recently reflected in S&P's downgrade of America's sovereign debt to France's level, is untroubling and even natural to him.
In days gone by, Americans with such attitudes were classified as isolationists. But the president is no advocate of insularity, instead choosing multilateralism and expressing it in rhetoric that could have come straight from its source, Woodrow Wilson. It was Wilson, after all, and not our first community-organizer president, who insisted that "there must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power, not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." Here is the ideology of negotiation and global governance in its fullest flower.
Radical as Obama is, his worldview is not dissimilar from those of a long line of liberal presidential candidates, stretching back decades. In 1988, for example, Vice President George H. W. Bush said of his November opponent, Michael Dukakis: "He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe." Precisely the same could be said about Obama. The only significant difference is that Obama made it to the White House, and Dukakis didn't. This is why, two years ago in Standpoint magazine, I called Obama our first "post-American President," one unburdened by American exceptionalism.
So what emerges from a president who is basically uninterested in foreign affairs, who doesn't see our manifold threats and challenges as worthy of presidential time and energy, who repeatedly stresses devotion to negotiations that are divorced from their substantive outcome, and who believes that multilateral fora rather than American resolve and power can address foreign problems? The now-indisputable answer is a failing, collapsing U.S. foreign policy.
Since his inauguration, for example, Obama has insisted that the nuclear-proliferation threat represented by Iran and North Korea could be defused through negotiation. Although he has never articulated the slightest reason to believe that either rogue state would voluntarily eliminate its weapons program, he has extended his "open hand," waiting for Tehran and Pyongyang to unclench their fists. In both cases, gullibility and the fascination with negotiation as a process, or perhaps just Obama's narcissism, have given the proliferators the precious assets of time and the cover of legitimacy, both of which they have unfortunately used all too productively.
In fact, Tehran accelerated and expanded its uranium-enrichment programs. Efforts at international sanctions were half-hearted and ineffective, as huge, recent construction contracts and potential oil-bartering agreements with China show. Much-touted computer-viruses have failed to impede Iran's enrichment capacity, as demonstrated by the accumulating evidence in public reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency and assessments by independent groups such as the Wisconsin Project and the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.
In July, even Obama's Treasury Department was forced to admit (albeit with minimal publicity from the Oval Office) that Shia Iran has been funding and sheltering a critical al-Qaeda supply chain for at least six years, as al-Qaeda works to kill Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. This is hardly surprising, since Iran has long been an equal-opportunity funder of and arms supplier for terrorism, including both Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon and Sunni Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank. U.S. military officials have contended for years that Iran was providing Shiite extremists in Iraq with RPGs and other weapons to use against American and coalition forces, and simultaneously supplying similar equipment to the Taliban, its former sworn enemy in Afghanistan, for use against U.S. and NATO troops there. While Iran's support for al-Qaeda may therefore seem disturbingly new, it is actually nothing of the sort.
What is disturbing is that President Obama apparently hasn't the slightest desire to explain these troubling conclusions to the American public, although his unaccustomed reticence is hardly surprising. This latest inconvenient development contravenes Obama's preferred narrative that al-Qaeda faces near-terminal decline, especially after Osama bin Laden's death, and that wide-ranging diplomatic engagement with Tehran's mullahs on nuclear weapons and other matters is still possible. It is as if the White House has forgotten the Bedouin proverb: "I against my brother; I and my brother against our cousin; my brother and our cousin against the neighbors; all of us against the strangers."
Moreover, Iran's free-flowing financial and weapons support for groups with widely divergent religious and ideological orientations has broad implications for the analysis of radical threats elsewhere in the Middle East. For example, Iran's support for Hamas, which is effectively a subsidiary of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, shows how Iran can fish in troubled waters far more extensively in Sunni, Arab regions than Obama expected from a Persian, Shia regime. Accordingly, therefore, the prospects for the Arab Spring to bring about democratic change, which have already fallen woefully short of expectations, can only become more problematic.
Regarding North Korea, the other main locus of nuclear-proliferation concern, Obama's policy of "strategic patience" has simply allowed Pyongyang to expand its uranium-enrichment activities in plain view, as well as continue to progress with ballistic-missile and other weapons programs. Both Japan and South Korea believe that the North has been making important progress on downsizing its nuclear devices in order to fit them onto its short- or medium-range ballistic missiles, or onto the long-range Taepodong-2. This intricate mating procedure requires either developing greater rocket thrust to launch heavier, bulkier payloads, or squeezing down the warheads to fit the existing missile capabilities. Increasing rocket power, decreasing warhead size, or both, will ultimately give the North the range of delivery systems it seeks. And the extensive evidence of cooperation between North Korea and Iran in the nuclear and ballistic-missile fields only continues to grow.
Obama has acted as though the gravest threat there to American interests and international peace and security is Israeli housing construction in the suburbs of Jerusalem.
Moreover, while Obama has dithered, South Korea has become increasingly concerned about yet another developing North Korean asymmetric capability: cyber-warfare. Pyongyang's interest and growing skills in the cyber field point directly to China as a source of assistance, given the prominent role Beijing has given information warfare, and our increasing awareness of sustained--and successful--Chinese probing of U.S. government and corporate information-technology assets. To date, North Korea's cyber attacks have apparently focused on the South, with at least three major incidents claimed since 2009. But they could readily be conducted worldwide.
In bilateral talks in New York in late July, Obama's diplomats treated North Korea's leading purveyors of disinformation as serious negotiating partners (a mistake unfortunately inherited from the Bush administration). Incredibly, rumors abound that these latest talks were really about the regime change in Pyongyang that will follow Kim Jong Il's death, as if these regime consiglieri could somehow be persuaded of a different succession plan, one more favorable to the United States. Certainly we should be stirring up dissension in North Korea, but New York is not the place to do it.
Inexperience, incompetence, and blind faith in negotiation have led to gridlock in the Middle East. Obama has acted as though the gravest threat there to American interests and international peace and security is Israeli housing construction in the suburbs of Jerusalem. Two-and-a-half years of such focus have produced essentially no progress in Israeli-Palestinian talks, just ongoing humiliation for the United States. And Obama's various reactions to the Arab Spring can be described only as contradictory and incoherent. In consequence, Islamist forces are rising in Egypt; the Syrian dictatorship, aided by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, is massacring civilians in Syria; Hezbollah's grasp on Lebanon is tightening; and our closest friends on the Arabian peninsula are rapidly distancing themselves from a United States they regard as weakening, irresolute, and unreliable. In Turkey, July's mass resignation of top generals may be conclusive evidence of the demise of Kemal Atatürk's vision of a secular state.
Obama's unwillingness even to discuss a "global war on terror," both to avoid "offending" Muslims (which he thinks this Bush-era phrase did), and because he just does not see the threat, continues undisturbed. After Osama bin Laden's well-deserved death, the White House quickly contended that al-Qaeda itself was in jeopardy, thereby inflating its own accomplishments and laying the groundwork for reduced military budgets and less-forward international positions generally. Equally promptly, however, Michael Leiter, outgoing head of the National Counterterrorism Center, and others emphatically refuted any such suggestion.
Then media reports appeared that al-Qaeda in Yemen was trying to produce ricin, a potent biological weapon. Of course, al-Qaeda's earliest manuals, many of which were captured in the aftermath of our 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government in Kabul, stressed al-Qaeda's desire to obtain nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Today we see evidence of their quest's continuing, not that Obama has seemingly ever paid much attention to it, or given it any prominence whatever in his public pronouncements.
In Libya, Qaddafi's removal has not mitigated the enduring toxic effects on the United States of Obama's ideology and weakness. He intervened for the wrong reasons, justifying military action under the abstract ideological doctrine of a "responsibility to protect" civilians; launched impressive initial military strikes, then backed off; called for Qaddafi's overthrow, but refused to say we would use military force to do so; then targeted Qaddafi--unsuccessfully for many months--without being willing to say so; then agreed with Britain and France that Qaddafi could actually stay in country if he gave up power; and then capped all these mistakes by inviting Russia in to mediate between our most important alliance and its military adversary. And who knows what will follow Qaddafi?
That Qaddafi has finally fallen despite these debilitating errors proves graphically how NATO could have succeeded at the outset rather than requiring five months of "kinetic military action." The key error was ideology, the ego-gratifying balm and moral superiority of the "responsibility to protect." But in pursuing the supposedly humanitarian doctrine, rather than "regime change," we neither swiftly ousted Qaddafi, nor ensured a successor regime congenial to the West, nor fully succeeded in protecting innocent civilians from the continuing misery of civil war. And tellingly, Obama's ideological knee-jerk propelling us into Libya was followed by inattention, the characteristic best describing his general approach to the rest of the world. No foreign friend or adversary could miss the point that, once launched into the conflict in Libya, Obama subsequently ignored it until the last days. NATO's intervention will long be remembered as a strategic embarrassment for the West, one directly attributable to Obama. He did not inherit this debacle from the Bush administration; he created it all by himself.
We could pass on to broader matters of grand strategy involving Russia and China, except that the Obama  administration has no grand strategy on Russia and China. Instead, zealous faith in negotiations for their own sake produced the ill-advised "reset" policy with Russia, and cravenness in dealing with China. And what has all of that obtained? Putin called America a "parasite economy," and China's official news agency lectured Washington on its financial failures. Surely this is some measure of how far America has sunk, when former KGB agents and China's Communist-party mouthpiece purport to instruct us on our economic policy.
Obama's personal and philosophical weakness is revealed most palpably in his view of the national-security budget.
With Russia, naïveté is Obama's dominant flaw. He believed, incredibly, that by canceling planned missile-defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, and broadly scaling back plans for national missile defense; agreeing to the ill-advised New START arms-control treaty; and turning a blind eye to Moscow's ongoing reassertion of hegemony in the former Soviet Union, he could persuade Russia to look kindly on American interests elsewhere. But appeasement, needless to say, has brought nothing but scorn from Moscow. And, incredibly, Obama's naïveté has not diminished in the face of it. Administration officials this summer quickly concluded that a bomb, attributed to Russian intelligence, which was detonated near our embassy in Georgia, was actually "an attempt to poke the Georgians in the eye, not the U.S." Indeed.
In early August, China began initial sea trials for its first aircraft carrier. While years away from posing a direct threat to the U.S. Navy, China's carrier reflects a wider expansion of both its conventional land and naval forces (including submarines) and its strategic-weapons capabilities. Coupled with increasingly assertive territorial claims in the South China Sea and bolder efforts to control transit rights in other nearby international waters, Beijing's arms buildup foreshadows a major challenge to America and its Asian friends. In response, Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to Beijing. More seriously, his administration also refused to sell to Taiwan the most advanced models of F-16 fighter-bombers.
China's focus on area-denial, anti-access weapons systems also underscores its objectives. If China can hold the U.S. Navy at bay and at risk, it can dramatically enhance its drive toward hegemony in East and Southeast Asia. To achieve this goal, Beijing does not need to be a global peer competitor to Washington militarily; it must only be capable of neutralizing the Western Pacific naval dominance we have enjoyed since 1945. Countering such a threat should be a serious priority at the Pentagon, but doing anything consequential would, of course, require additional financial resources for personnel and weapons systems.
Here in particular America is at risk. Obama's personal and philosophical weakness is revealed most palpably in his view of the national-security budget. Deep spending cuts ($400 billion) in Obama's first three Pentagon fiscal years, when virtually every other agency and entitlement program was enjoying substantial, indeed extravagant, increases, were already painful enough. But truly staggering is the combination of the further defense cuts ($350 billion) Obama ordered at the start of this year, which are now essentially written into the first tranche of cuts in the compromise legislation raising the debt ceiling, not to mention to the $500-600 billion in additional cuts that will be required if the recent debt-ceiling legislation's "trigger mechanism" kicks in.
Had Obama openly proposed defense cuts of such magnitude, conservatives would surely have risen in furious opposition. But in the blue smoke and mirrors of arcane budget debates, Obama has succeeded beyond his wildest ideological fantasy. The Washington Post's Robert Samuelson wrote that the debt-ceiling deal "reflects liberal preferences" and was "mostly a triumph of the welfare state over the Pentagon." With conservatives scoring "own goals" (as the Europeans say in soccer) like this, no wonder Obama sees virtue in "leading from behind." Obama is too sinuous a politician to admit this growing record of failure, but that very sinuousness also explains much of his problem. He combines an inability to perceive threats--by not understanding that real differences exist between countries, not just poor communication--with inattention and laziness, naïveté, ideology, and faith in negotiation. His administration's foreign policy has thus produced a sorry record, with every prospect for an even sorrier future.
Tracing these factors to their logical conclusions, we can see that Obama is simply an invention; there is less to him than meets the eye. Worse than being merely doctrinaire, he is hollow at the center. And that is most assuredly not what we need today, or for another presidential term.
John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI