Summer 2014—Summer Retreat: Overwhelming Evidence Of America’s Declining Influence, Sovereignty, And Willpower

A few months ago, on this blog, I wrote a post about the importance of the United States maintaining its position of strategic strength and that position’s proportional relationship to world peace and stability. With the passing of the summer months, I regretfully conclude that America’s national security, influence in foreign affairs, and military power projection abilities have all continued to degrade and decline due to the current presidential administration’s incompetence and ineptitude regarding foreign policy. Indeed, the actions—or rather, the inactions—of Barack Obama in countering the multitude of national security threats now facing the nation demonstrate that he does not care about America losing its place as the world’s lone superpower. Barack Obama is costing us not only our position of strength on the world stage; he is also injuring our country’s sovereignty and authority.

The purpose of this blog post is to demonstrate to you, the reader, how events during the past few years—and especially this summer—have combined together to overwhelmingly demonstrate why, in a world filled with individuals, groups, and governments ill-disposed towards peace and freedom, it is dangerous to have a deficiency of leadership in the White House.

The foremost responsibility of the President of the United States is to protect and defend the Constitution, the type of government it ensures the American people, and the interests of the American government and people across the globe. The President of the United States is supposed to be the first in line for leadership in any fight that concerns American interests, and the president is supposed to be vigilant in preparing this country to defend itself and its allies.

President Barack Obama has failed to do these things. Remarkably, events have combined together this summer to provide rare firsthand proof that Barack Obama does not care about performing these important duties. For reasons that appear confusing to the American public, President Obama does not seem interested in stepping up to the plate and providing the fearless leadership that this country and its allies now so desperately need.

On December 14^th, 2011, President Obama gave a speech at Fort Bragg to the assembled troops in which he talked about American influence in the Middle East. In this speech, he praised his own administration’s supposed successes in post-Saddam Iraq:

“We're leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq with a representative government that was elected by its people. We're building a new partnership between our nations. And we are ending a war, not with a final battle, but with a final march toward home. This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making.”

When this summer’s events are taken into consideration, the idiocy of Barack Obama’s Fort Bragg braggadocio becomes clear.

At the end of 2011, Barack Obama was in the heat of the 2012 presidential campaign. He was clearly focused on demonstrating to the American public that he was a responsible custodian of U.S. foreign affairs and national security. He sought to portray himself as the worthy successor of an Iraq policy that had led to ultimate victory in the Middle East (few people seem to remember that Obama opposed the Iraq War from its inception). He hoped to convince people that because of him and his administration, the war in Iraq had been won and lasting peace had been achieved.

In other words, President Obama desperately needed a timely victory in Iraq, and he needed it BEFORE the election in November of 2012. He needed to show the world that his administration had won the Iraq War and the larger War on Terror. As time would tell, President Obama’s attitude in this regard proved dangerously premature. Because our president put his own political needs above the realities on the ground in the Middle East, we now stand to lose everything that we fought for in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the Middle East as a region.

During the George W. Bush administration, we fought two successful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, deposed two ruthless dictatorships that threatened the stability of the area, led a successful diplomatic campaign that won over moderate Muslim governments in the region, and maintained strong support for Israel.

But now, in the summer of 2014, can anyone honestly and realistically argue that the U.S. position in the Middle East is favorable?

The situation in the Middle East first started falling apart when President Obama announced his premature and permanent troop withdrawals in Iraq and then Afghanistan. These announcements signaled to American enemies that our country’s stamina had worn out, that the U.S. had lost the will to fight or provide needed support for our allies.

A rising tide of instability quickly emerged. Beginning in late 2010, revolutions, demonstrations, protests, riots, and civil wars rocked the Arab world, including Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Israel, Sudan, Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Western Sahara, Mali, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority.

One thing only united these outbursts of discontent: large groups of people in these countries sought to overthrow their countries’ governments. In a general sense, little else can be said about these uprisings. Some patterns did become clear to those who were interested. On December 20^th, 2012, James Phillips wrote an article entitled “The Arab Spring Descends into Islamist Winter: Implications for U.S. Policy.” I now quote from this article:

“In 2011 and 2012, a wave of popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East shook the region’s autocratic regimes, prompting euphoric reactions in the West about an ‘Arab Spring’ and a supposed new age of democracy. While the overthrow of authoritarian regimes can give democracy a chance to bloom, it has also created opportunities for a wide spectrum of Islamist parties to advance their undemocratic agendas. Islamist insurgents and terrorist organizations also are well positioned to expand their influence amid the political instability that has emerged in many countries. The Middle East has become an even more hostile strategic environment in which regional security, U.S. national interests, and Western values are increasingly under attack. The United States cannot afford to react with indifference.

“The popular rebellions that erupted in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and, to a lesser extent, in other Arab countries during the so-called Arab Spring are works in progress that, so far, have yielded a variety of outcomes. In many cases, the broad ad hoc coalitions that ousted authoritarian regimes dissolved in acrimony, power struggles, and ideological clashes that continue to undermine stability in the region. Islamists seeking to impose harsh interpretations of Sharia law, which restricts freedoms, particularly of religious minorities and women, have emerged as leading contenders for power.

“Islamists pose an ideological threat to Western values, though not necessarily an immediate security threat to the United States, unless they support terrorism or violent revolution. Anti-American terrorism is often an outgrowth of Islamist totalitarian movements, such as al-Qaeda, which use terrorism as a tool to advance revolutionary goals such as the imposition of a harsh and intolerant brand of Sharia, the creation of a totalitarian Islamist state, and the eventual global caliphate. Al-Qaeda is much more than a terrorist group—it sees itself as the vanguard of a global Islamist totalitarian revolution. To this end, it seeks to exploit local and regional conflicts to advance its vision of a global Islamist insurgency.

“Al-Qaeda and other Islamist totalitarians not only pose an immediate threat to the United States but also to a wide spectrum of Muslims and non-Muslims in the region who could be potential allies of the United States. Al-Qaeda cloaks its totalitarian goals in Islamic religious symbols and claims to be defending Islam, but it has killed more Muslims than non-Muslims and more Arabs than Americans. To defeat the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda, the United States must recognize the appeal of the group’s revolutionary ideology and expose it as a threat to the lives and freedoms of Muslims.

“To prevent al-Qaeda and other Islamist totalitarian groups from exploiting the turbulence of the Arab Spring to advance their radical agenda, the United States should seek allies in Arab governments, secular groups, tribal leaders, and other groups threatened by Islamist totalitarians. It should also engage Muslim religious groups and political parties if they reject violence and unequivocally support democratic principles.

“The “Arab Spring” that began in 2011 has ushered in an unprecedented political transformation that has devolved in varying degrees into a chaotic ‘Islamist Winter’ in many Arab countries that increasingly threatens U.S. national interests. Washington lost a key strategic partner when Egypt’s Mubarak regime was replaced by one dominated by the anti-Western Muslim Brotherhood. Other regional allies in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen now face mounting challenges posed by Islamist-dominated political opposition movements.

“Where elections have been held, anti-Western Islamist political parties of various stripes that are ideologically predisposed to oppose U.S. foreign policy goals, have generally been the chief beneficiaries. Although they cloak their radical agendas in lip service to democratic ideals, their ultimate goal is to subvert genuine democracy by exploiting elections as a means to vault to power and impose Sharia law.

“The countries affected by the “Arab Spring” face much more difficult transitions to stable democracy than is generally recognized. Islamists have been the big winners in the political upheavals so far: They have captured the leadership of governments in Egypt and Tunisia, exert a growing influence in Libya, and play key roles in insurgencies in Mali, Syria, and Yemen. Although al-Qaeda played a small role in the initial phases of the Arab uprisings, it is now positioned to exploit the aftermath—chaos, anarchy, and power vacuums in failed or failing states. It is in the U.S. national interest, as well as in the interests of U.S. allies and most Arabs, to prevent Islamist extremists from hijacking the unfinished revolutions and imposing totalitarian dictatorships in the affected countries. That will not happen without concerted focused leadership from Washington.

“Proactive thoughtful engagement centered on protecting U.S. interests and promoting peace and prosperity in the region is a more cost-effective alternative to the cycle of violence and repression that is likely to emerge from the Arab uprisings if met with American indifference.”

Unfortunately, two of Phillips’ fears became reality. The Arab uprisings DID lead to an al-Qaeda resurgence, and they DID lead to American indifference. Islamists took advantage of the Arab Spring, and instead of using American diplomatic action and military power projection capabilities to defend moderate Muslim governments and American allies in the region, President Obama did nothing. In fact, there were several instances where President Obama naively expressed his hope that the Arab Spring revolutionaries would somehow turn democratic. Somehow, Obama forgot history’s lesson that revolutions, unless carefully guided through their inevitable radical phases, usually result in the replacement of oppressive regimes with even more repressive regimes.

As the Arab Spring unfolded (and continues to unfold even now) in places like Egypt, Libya, and Syria, the Obama administration repeatedly demonstrated its inability to differentiate between America’s friends and foes. For example, in regards to the civil war in Syria, the White House did little else beyond expressing hope that the Bashar al-Assad regime would fall apart on its own. Because of this, the fractured Syrian rebel groups turned away from secular moderates and threw their lot in with radical al-Qaeda types.

Obama has continued to lead his administration in a determined campaign of unending observation coupled with determined inaction. Frustratingly, this has happened in Iraq as well. In January of this year, a radical al-Qaeda offshoot organization seized the important cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. These cities are both inside Iraq’s Anbar province, where nearly one-third of the 4,488 U.S. troops who died in the Iraq War lost their lives. It cannot be doubted that the radicals who seized these cities did so in the full knowledge and benefit of the Obama administration’s abrupt troop pullout. Because Obama was eager to remove American influence in the Middle East and maintain the fantasy that the “tide of war” was “receding,” the administration allowed the situation in Iraq to go from bad to worse. Secretary of State John Kerry asserted, “This is a fight that belongs to the Iraqis.”

Doesn’t the Secretary of State realize that the fight against al-Qaeda is not just Iraq’s fight but also America’s? Don’t Obama’s people recognize that al-Qaeda has greatly expanded its operations in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, and North Africa? Do they not appreciate the need for bolstering strategic cooperation with Iraq and other allies battling the terrorists?

In the House of Representatives in early April of this year, the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade held a hearing provocatively titled “Is Al-Qaeda Winning?” As part of this hearing, former senator Joseph Lieberman testified that “put very bluntly, Syria has become the most dangerous terrorist sanctuary in the world today—and the United States has no coherent or credible policy for dealing with it.” Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute assessed that al-Qaeda’s “brand is spreading like wildfire, the groups affiliating themselves with it control more fighters, land and wealth than they ever have, and they are opening up new fronts.” Readily apparent throughout this hearing was the underlying theme that the Obama administration has been ignoring al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups who have exploited the more permissive environments in many countries destabilized by the “Arab Spring” uprisings. Al-Qaeda has made a comeback in Iraq and Syria and gained followers in Egypt, Libya, Mali, East Africa, and Yemen.

Recently, America’s allies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been facing disturbing setbacks against radical Islam. And yet, President Obama has been slow to react, as if he couldn’t care less if those two countries—where thousands of U.S. troops have bled and died—were handed back over to our country’s enemies.

Why would he allow this?

A mere two months ago, Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki sent a request to President Obama asking for U.S. air support in his government’s battle against Islamist terrorists attempting to seize even more territory. Obama refused to do that, saying he would not allow American troops to become involved in yet another debacle in Iraq. Instead, Obama claimed he would make a decision about the situation in Iraq “in the days ahead,” completely ruling out the use of ground forces. As terrorists neared Baghdad, Obama added that the fighting in Iraq “poses a danger to Iraq and its people and, given the nature of these terrorists, it could pose a threat eventually to American interests as well. We will not be sending U.S. troops back into combat in Iraq, but I have asked my national security team to prepare a range of other options.”

Other options? What does that even mean? An ally asked for help, and from all appearances the U.S. president responded negatively to that request.

“People should not anticipate that this is something that is going to happen overnight,” Obama said. “We want to make sure that we have good eyes on the situation there. We want to make sure that we’ve gathered all the intelligence that’s necessary so that if in fact I do direct and order any actions there, that they’re targeted, they’re precise and they’re going to have an effect…the United States is not simply going to involve itself in a military action in the absence of a political plan by the Iraqis that gives us some assurance that they’re prepared to work together…we’re not going to allow ourselves to be dragged back into a situation in which while we’re there we’re keeping a lid on things.”

Well, Mr. President, it could be admitted that NO ONE enjoys keeping a lid on dangerous terrorist groups, but that doesn’t mean the job shouldn’t be done.

Representative Howard McKeon of California, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said “the White House has a history of ‘considering all options’ while choosing none… there are no quick-fix solutions to this crisis, and I will not support a one-shot strike that looks good for the cameras but has no enduring effect… The president should also ask himself if his White House national security team is equal to the crisis at hand. I don’t believe they are.”

Representative McKeon’s appraisal was correct. Considering all options while choosing none; that truly is Obama’s grand plan for handling threats to world peace and American interests. It’s become a common theme in the president’s foreign policy record thus far. While Obama’s administration dithered, the message effectively sent to the allied Iraqi government was “you’re on your own.”

Obama’s dithering hasn’t been limited to the Middle East. We are now all familiar with the ongoing standoff between the Ukrainian government and the separatists in the east of the country receiving support from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Since I wrote a great deal about this situation in my last blog post, I will not recite my own explanations and positions here. Suffice to say that the Obama administration’s handling of the separatist threat to Ukraine—and the shameful shoot-down by separatists of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, the deadliest airliner shoot-down in history—has been disturbingly and similarly ineffective.

In the aftermath of the shoot-down of Flight 17, journalist Noah Rothman wrote that “President Barack Obama’s reaction to the worst attack on a civilian aircraft since September 11, 2001 was …underwhelming. Without even issuing a statement of condemnation, as did his last predecessor to face Russian aggression, the president devoted all of 38 seconds to addressing what he called a ‘tragedy’ over the skies of Ukraine. Obama’s caution is another example of the president refusing to address crises in a timely fashion… Hillary Clinton confirmed that when she told Charlie Rose that this whole plane mess is really Europe’s problem.”

Clinton, who served as Obama’s Secretary of State from January 21^st, 2009 to February 1^st, 2013, explained that “the Europeans have tried to figure out the best way forward. From my perspective — and I have the benefit of not being in the government — if there is evidence linking Russia to this, that should inspire the Europeans to do much more. So Europeans have to be the ones to take the lead on this. It was a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur over European territory. There should be outrage in European capitals.”

 As if outrage should only be felt in specifically European capitals?

Clearly, Clinton has not lost touch with the Obama administration’s modus operandi since she left official government service. She clearly recognized and agreed with the White House signaling that the U.S. doesn’t really care all that much for ensuring the world’s security, that America, under President Obama’s leadership, is hurtling down a path of full-fledged retreat.

And the summer retreat continues…

Just a few short weeks ago, the ongoing Gaza–Israel conflict escalated into more armed clashes between Palestinian Hamas terrorists and the Israel Defense Forces. Fighting intensified dramatically in 2006 when Hamas, a radical Palestinian and Sunni Islamist terrorist organization, seized power in the Gaza Strip. Hamas initiated rocket attacks and kidnappings against Israel and provoked the IDF to launch counterattacks of its own.

Just this summer, Hamas reconciled its differences with the other major Palestinian faction, Fatah, and announced the formation of a unified Palestinian governing body. Despite the warnings of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the new Palestinian government represented a victory for terrorism, many other governments (including Barack Obama’s administration) agreed to work with the Palestinian unity government; Barack Obama’s backing of the terrorist-sponsored government was especially unsettling to the Israelis. Feeling the situation had reached intolerable limits, the Israelis launched minor military attacks against Hamas and prepared to enact sanctions. In July, Israeli artillery and air strikes pounded the Gaza Strip even as Hamas intensified its own rocket attacks. Israel launched an invasion with its ground forces, seeking to destroy Hamas’s extensive tunnel and underground military infrastructure. As of this blog posting, the fighting continues.

How did the Obama administration respond? With its own horrid history of treating the Israelis with contempt and disrespect, the White House said much but did little. President Obama merely requested that both sides exercise restraint, obviously failing to grasp the realities of what war entails: two parties reach an impasse that necessitates one party defeating the other in order for that impasse to be resolved. The White House admitted that Israel had a right to defend itself, but John Kerry’s harshest words for the Hamas terror organization centered on an embarrassingly tame request for the Palestinians to “step up and show a level of reasonableness.”

 Reasonableness? From a group willing to kill innocent civilians in order to make a political statement? Reasonableness from an organization which advocates the slaughter of Jews and the “invalidation” of the state of Israel? Reasonableness from a bunch of thugs who glorify jihad and death for Allah as the highest of human aspirations?

John Kerry needs to do his homework. Unfortunately, he seems to believe in moral equivalence between the sovereign and democratic state of Israel and Islamist terrorists.

"No country, no human being, is comfortable with children being killed," he said of Palestinian civilian deaths. "But we're not comfortable with Israeli soldiers dying either."

On July 20^th, U.S. senator Lindsey Graham had this to say about John Kerry’s irresponsible and insulting evaluation of the Gaza-Israel conflict: “It scares me that [Kerry] believes the world is in such good shape. America is the glue that holds the free world together. Leading from behind is not working.”

Unfortunately, leading from behind is what the Obama administration does best.

On July 21^st, just one day after Senator Graham shared his worries, I took inventory of my own evaluations of Obama’s handling of foreign affairs and national security. I reflected upon my own feelings and concerns, and the pattern of retreat discussed in this blog post became clear to me. From the Arab Spring to the confrontation with Islamist terrorists in Iraq, from negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan to the inexplicable and inexcusable Benghazi scandal in Libya, and from the Syrian civil war to the Ukrainian-Russian standoff, the Obama administration has consistently failed to differentiate between America’s allies and enemies and to proactively stand up for U.S. interests. Whether it be vicious fighting in the Gaza Strip, the toppling of an allied government in Egypt, or the dishonorable shoot-down of a civilian airliner in Europe, President Barack Obama has shown nothing but indifference and carelessness in his primary duty as defender of the free world.

President Obama does not believe the United States has the moral authority to dictate terms to the bad guys of the world. I don’t believe he feels it’s appropriate for the United States to tell other nations what they can and cannot do, even if those nations behave in disreputable ways. Obama does not believe the United States is a special country with a unique history and legacy that makes it the best hope for humankind’s strivings towards freedom, peace, and prosperity.

It’s as if our president feels guilty about this country’s imperfect past, and that he seeks to make it up to the world. Obama and his foreign policy team seem uninterested in doing anything on the world stage beyond the deliverance of tongue lashings to terrorists and dictators. Even when they say actions will be taken (think Benghazi or the Syrian civil war), such actions are usually ineffective and wasteful. They fail to understand that America really is the glue that holds the free world together.

Rush Limbaugh, on his radio program, recently asked, “How many generations have grown up being taught, educated, tempered, and treated to the whole notion of moral equivalence? That the United States is no better than anybody else, and we have no right to tell anybody else what to do, and we have no business being concerned what happens in the rest of the world? See, this is one of the many areas that I think we dramatically need a reeducation program for the American people, particularly young people. Because what we're talking about is precisely what this country was in the world, precisely the kind of position this country occupied in the world. And it wasn't that we demanded it. It wasn't that we were tyrants and ran around the world and demanded that everybody else respect us and treat us as the world's superpower and bow down and kiss our feet and look up to us. We didn't demand any of that; it happened. It happened naturally. It happened because we were—without doubt and without question—for most of the people in the world, the beacon of liberty and freedom. We did indeed have the moral authority to defend freedom and to liberate the oppressed anywhere in the world we found it necessary, particularly if our own national interests were at stake. We had all of that. It was a result of the natural outgrowth of this country's greatness.”

This country’s greatness. That is precisely what I feel is missing from the Barack Obama presidency. I have never seen any evidence that our current president believes in this country’s unique greatness.

Limbaugh continued: “Imagine, if you will, [Obama’s] kind of attitude, this kind of leadership all during the seventies and eighties when the Soviet Union was in fact a real superpower—at least militarily. Imagine not having leaders who believed that the Soviet Union was an immoral insult. Imagine not having leaders who thought the Soviet Union was a threat to free human beings everywhere, and that something had to be done about it.

“Imagine the Berlin Wall never coming down.”

For all the reasons I’ve brought up in this post, I agree wholeheartedly with Rush Limbaugh on this matter. This has been a summer of retreat for the United States of America, with President Barack Obama leading the way. In the wake of the September 11^th terrorist attacks and the hard-fought road forged by the George W. Bush administration, this retreat has been both dangerous and unnecessary. The world has not become a safer place since 2009. American and Western interests are not more secure than they were before Obama’s election to the presidency.

As I have said before, President Obama seems to hold primary allegiance to some sort of transnational cosmopolitanism instead of to the United States and its interests. For political reasons, Obama is entirely invested in ensuring that the war on terrorism is forced to an end regardless of whether or not U.S. victory is actually achieved. Discrediting George W. Bush’s foreign policy and Obama’s own desires to relinquish U.S. global dominance conveniently reinforce one another. Obama seeks to scale back U.S. influence around the world—all while appearing to NOT lose the war on terrorism. Obama himself has made it clear that the U.S. needs to show more deference to the opinions of other countries and peoples. Think of his embarrassing apology tour, for which he received a Nobel Peace Prize. Think of how he cancelled the sharing of missile defense technology with allies in Poland and the Czech Republic, all for the sake of avoiding offending the Russians. Obama seems hell-bent on portraying himself as the anti-Bush, as a leader who does not seek to use American power to shape the world. Instead, Obama appears to earnestly solicit the help of the world in curtailing American power.

To win the War on Terror, dedicated U.S. officials will be forced to confront domestic political opposition to prosecuting the war in the first place. Antiwar sentiments have steadily emerged to the point where the Western democracies are quickly losing the will to fight. If the U.S. is to be victorious, policymakers must be coherent and forthright in expounding principled reasons for the continued fight against terrorism. On the military, diplomatic, and economic fronts, victory for the U.S. is inevitable, but if the West fails to keep its resolve up to for the conflict’s prosecution, the war against radical Islam may be lost.

We, the people of the United States, need to have the will to win the War on Terror. We need the will to use American power and influence for good as they have been used in the past. The role performed by the United States is not an easy one, but it is a necessary one. Similarly, the role performed by the American president is not an easy one, but it is a necessary one. In the future, the American public must choose leaders with more insight and understanding of this country’s legacy and destiny than the man currently leading the headlong retreat towards American decline.

Let’s learn from the events of this summer. Let’s learn the right lessons from this summer of retreat and recommit ourselves to actively defending our nation’s honored place as the world’s beacon of liberty and freedom.

--Christopher Peterson, August 8^th, 2014