U.S., Lead or Get out of the Way
The current drift in foreign policy could be disastrous.

At the crossroads the Middle East is approaching — in the Iranian nuclear program, the Afghan War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the internal political evolution in Pakistan, Iraq, and Turkey — there is a confusing glimpse of what the world's most turbulent region looks like as American influence conducts an orderly retreat. All present indications are that the Obama administration is not prepared to interdict militarily the Iranian acquisition of a deliverable nuclear military capability, and also lacks the political muscle or ingenuity to persuade the necessary powers of the virtues of what Secretary Clinton boldly described in more purposeful recent times as "crippling sanctions."

President Obama has muddied the waters with a lot of hopeful but rather vapid talk of nuclear disarmament, which the Russians are prepared to join in as long as it reduces American nuclear superiority, but not further; and to which no other present or imminent nuclear power will accord the slightest credence. Since not even this administration has so far succumbed to the lunacy of unilateral disarmament, and the Russians are unlikely to take this down another notch and leave themselves unnecessarily vulnerable to the antics of the Chinese, this train to nowhere has probably reached its destination already.

The effort to arm the friendly Middle Eastern countries, especially Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and Emirates, with intermediate missile defenses (THAAD) is a sensible step. But to the extent that the administration thinks that it will be an adequate balm to the host countries' concerns about nuclear-warhead-equipped ayatollahs in Tehran, it is another dangerous fantasy. In one sense, the world can be grateful to Ahmadinejad and Khamenei for lifting the rock on the farce of nuclear-arms control. It has been a club that anyone could join without more than gentle rifting in the club lounge, as long as they appeared to be unlikely to start pitching such weapons around indiscriminately. Despite the claims of Mao Tse-tung that China could endure a nuclear exchange and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, the more blood-curdling noises of some of the cavalcade of disconcerting ephemeral chiefs in Islamabad, and the reactionary aberrance of the descendants of the Trekboers in apartheid Pretoria, all these countries were almost uncomplainingly allowed in. The Clinton administration's madcap sanctions against India and Pakistan illustrated the feebleness of club disapproval while making America's strategic position in South Asia completely unsustainable.

Now that a country whose leadership speaks glibly of a love of death and of its intention to obliterate Israel is thrusting into the club, to the apparent indifference of most of the neighboring countries that have the most at risk from such a move (i.e., Russia, China, and India), all doors and windows will be open. The world will then move quickly, probably within 20 years, to a security system based on universal assured destruction. Fifty or more countries will join the nuclear club, on the understanding that a few countries will possess a semi-viable anti-missile defense and all the others will be destroyed completely if they attack another nuclear power. The Armageddon feared by the original nuclear scientific community will be at hand. And there will certainly be nuclear attacks and counterattacks, and eventually almost routine massacres of millions of people.

To forestall this fate, there is only one alternative, unless this administration has the greatest official resurrection of purpose since Neville Chamberlain abruptly gave Poland a unilateral and virtually unsolicited territorial guarantee after Hitler seized Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, four months after the Munich Conference had produced "peace in our time." If the U.S. sits like a great jelly while Iran arms up, there is only one happy ending to this chapter: The Arab powers may set aside the insane preoccupation with the red herring of Israel that has enabled them to distract the Arab masses from their chronic national failures and general misgovernment for the past 60 years, and pressure the Palestinians into a sensible land-for-peace deal in exchange for Israel's knocking out the Iranian nuclear capability and returning as often as necessary to keep it down. Presumably, the U.S. will not heed the advice of the formerly sensible Zbigniew Brzezinski to shoot down Israeli planes en route to Iran (demonstrating the power of the self-destructive pandemic of the Carter administration, which has now afflicted almost everyone above the doorkeepers in that regime). This would be a regional solution, and would resolve the two biggest problems in the region (Iran and Palestine) simultaneously — like, to use a local precedent, Alexander the Great's slicing the Gordian Knot.

On Afghanistan, there are now four competing arguments on the way forward. The admirable Max "Boots on the Ground" Boot wants to slog it out, defeat the Taliban, force Karzai to clean up his government to an appreciable degree, and nation-build. He quite rightly demystifies guerrilla war, pointing out that most guerrilla wars fail, and that guerrilla warriors conduct the wars they do only because they don't have the ability to conduct a main-unit war. This is a viable option if, as Boot believes to be the case, the second option doesn't work. This second option is the Henry Kissinger view that the U.S. should hand over the country in a series of concessions, like fried-chicken franchises, to the local groups already sponsoring them, and rely on Russia, Pakistan, India, Iran, and perhaps Uzbekistan to work out some unimaginably complicated local amalgamation of interests. The third option is that of the inimitable Joe Biden, to continue firing cruise missiles and drone-generated missiles at suspect sites, risking no American lives. This is a hare-brained idea that can be rejected on the basis of its source, without listening to the actual proposal. And fourth, a suggestion from the American Left, fronted by the inevitable Bruce Ackerman, which — like everything the domestic far Left has proposed in foreign-policy matters in the last 40 years — would humiliate America and generate chaos: cut and run.

I must profess some solidarity with the president, as quoted by Bob Woodward. Mr. Obama is right not to want to "nation-build," or to stay ten years, or to spend a trillion dollars, in Afghanistan. But Kissinger's Option 2 will become feasible only as Boot's Option 1 starts to work, so Obama has to sound and be purposeful enough to start making the Boot option look plausible enough to hand off the war to the Kissinger Option. This will require more finesse than anyone has shown since the Iraqi surge, but should be possible and is the best bet. I don't see how the U.S. can go on assisting Pakistan if the Pakistan-backed Haqqani faction of the Afghan Taliban continues to attack the Allies in Afghanistan. Either the assistance to or by Pakistan or the attacks on the Allies must stop, or the West will continue to be on both sides in the Afghan "war of necessity."

After any such denouement, Iraq should be strong enough adequately to resist the encroachments of Iran, and the U.S. can withdraw to the status of a well-paid armorer (much the best domestic economic stimulus). Similarly, there is not much more to do in the Far East. The idea that China will dominate everyone in the region if the U.S. doesn't shore everybody up is rubbish. China is gratuitously annoying the Indians and Japanese, trespassing in Japanese waters, making irritating claims to worthless islands, meddling in Kashmir, refusing visas to Indian notables. Let them go on with it; eventually, all their neighbors, including the Russians and Vietnamese and Taiwan, will hold hands and contain them. North Korea is just a Chinese puppet state that Beijing has manipulated to annoy everyone else. Let the locals contain China, with the tangible support of the American presence in Japan and South Korea (which could be reduced) and anti-missile defenses. Latin America is progressing well with minimal American involvement and the U.S. has wisely never tried to play a role in Africa.

Ukraine and Georgia could be divided into Russian and Western sections now. Western Europe is more than adequately strong to deal with any mischief or rambunctiousness from the Russian bear, now that it is less than half the size of its Cold War girth and shorn of the satellites. The U.S. was magnificent in the defeat of the Nazis, imperial Japanese, and Soviet Communists, and in the inducement of China into at least state capitalism. But — apart from the facilitation of NATO expansion through Bill Clinton's bunk about a Partnership for Peace (via dismemberment of the Soviet bloc), and possibly the setting up of a post-Saddam power-sharing regime in Iraq — the U.S. has been completely ineffectual in the world since the original Gulf War and the end of the Cold War 20 years ago.

The U.S. shows no signs of being prepared to pay down its mountain of debt, and is every year forfeiting the natural respect it acquired in the 1940s and maintained to the end of the 20th century as the world's undisputed leader. An American failure to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power will signal the end of American world leadership, whether Israel steps up to the task or not. The U.S. cannot afford to masquerade as a decisive influence where it does not have the will or judgment to assert such an influence. Unless new leadership arises in the next election to end the current-account deficit and unsustainable oil imports, reorient the country to physical production and less unproductive "services," and redesign alliances to contemporary needs and real possibilities, it should continue the orderly withdrawal already in progress. It won the Cold War, disposed of Saddam, and can retire in good order, undefeated, to a defensible perimeter. It was the indispensable country to the West, in 1917–18, and 1939–90, but it is largely dispensable now, and is providing no discernibly useful leadership at all. If it rediscovers its aptitude for successful and innovative internationalism, it can raise its level of involvement. The trend to decentralization of national influences relieves the U.S. of the burdens of a superpower and provides regional balances that can be influenced from Washington with relatively little exertion. On the present course, it is risking a severe humiliation, and an undignified retreat into its doghouse like a chastened puppy. The current level of official amateurism, if allowed to continue indefinitely, is going to lead to needless disaster.

– Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at [email protected].

© 2024 Conrad Black