Blundering into Success
The Obama team may be winning a big victory in Pakistan.

By the standards of other Great Powers, the foreign policy of the United States has often been erratic. Its national interest has frequently been questioned, and sometimes negated, especially by conscientious groups who represent America's allies and protégés as morally unworthy of U.S. support. This has almost never occurred in the history of other important countries (e.g., China's courtship of Iran, North Korea, and the worst of the African despotisms), except for the famous Disraeli–Gladstone dispute over support of the Turks in the 19th century.

Woodrow Wilson's assurance that the "wonderful and heartening" initial revolution in Russia in 1917 was an expression that "the great, generous Russian people . . . had always, in fact, been democratic at heart" made the American public and Congress happy to make common cause with it. (It need hardly be added that no such Russian thirst for democracy has revealed itself in the 93 years that have followed.) This was the first of many American celebrations of upheavals in foreign countries that soon proved to be disastrous for this country. The (well-founded) demonization of Nazism was necessary to promote aid to the British and Canadians in 1940–41, let alone assistance to the USSR when it was attacked by Germany. Prodigies of Red Scare fear-mongering were necessary to promote post-war aid to Europe and globe-girdling anti-Communist alliances. The end justified the means, but some of the antics of McCarthy and his followers were a disgrace.

Yet when the heat was turned up, even the British, French, and Israelis at Suez, Cuba's Batista, Diem and Thieu in Saigon, Somoza in Nicaragua, and, incredibly, the shah of Iran, were "thrown out like dead mice" (as one senior policy adviser put it in the shah's case), for Nasser, Castro, Ho Chi Minh and his followers, the Sandinistas, and Khomeini. Chile's Allende was less fortunate, but no more undeserving than these other beneficiaries of misplaced American idealism. The New York Times and The New York Review of Books both still publish opinion pieces that claim the Khomeini Revolution had something to do with democracy. The great but ever-worldly idealist Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right when he famously said of Somoza: "He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch."

In this unpredictable way, the United States went from the straight-arming of the world and an official inability to distinguish between Nazi Germany and the British and the French, to passionate and almost universal anti-Communist activism in less than ten years, 1939 to 1949, taking on as allies even the pre-war ogres Franco, Salazar, and Chiang Kai-shek.

In the one act of exquisite Machiavellianism of his recorded life, as well as the greatest act of statesmanship of his career, George W. Bush waited patiently for the report of the Iraq Study Group set up by his father's friends to afford him a face-saving cover for bugging out of Iraq, stuffed with such strategic experts as Vernon Jordan, Rudolph Giuliani, and Sandra Day O'Connor. Inevitably, it determined that peace depended on the resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian problem and other pie-in-the-sky objectives. George W. ignored the report, escalated the war, and plucked Robert Gates, a Study Group member, to execute the policy, which he has done skillfully, for Bush and Obama. It was a maneuver of piquant subtlety from a leader to whom such finesse did not come easily or often.

Even with this background, the development of recent Middle Eastern policy has been unprecedented. Pre-candidate Obama was hostile to the Iraq War, and quite sanguine about acknowledging defeat in that war. Senate majority leader Harry Reid declared the war "lost" in 2007 and tried repeatedly to set a date for compulsory force withdrawals. The Democratic 2004 presidential candidate and now the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, John Kerry, infamously campaigned to be commander-in-chief on having voted to send the forces to Iraq, but not to fund them once they were there. His predecessor as Foreign Relations chairman, now Vice President Joe Biden, who has opposed almost every successful foreign-policy initiative of the last 30 years, called for dividing Iraq into three ethnic states and then fleeing the theater like the scoundrels in Mark Twain's Royal Nonesuch. He has preserved his remarkable track record by advocating that the cave-dwelling terrorists on the Afghan–Pakistani border be combated with missiles fired from warships in the Persian Gulf.

The presidential nominating campaign among the Democrats was largely based on the supposition that Iraq was an irretrievable disaster and that the Bush administration had probably lied about Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction. There were even murmurings of impeachment, the suicidal impulse that has afflicted the U.S. political system since Watergate. The candidates for the nomination, led by the current president and secretary of state, contended in the fervor and longevity of their hostility to the Iraq War, while Mr. Obama repeatedly called Afghanistan, by comparison, "a necessary war."

Once in office, it all changed. Mr. Obama waffled for a disturbingly long time before reinforcing the Afghan effort. His planned Iraq withdrawal has been very professionally executed, and — contrary to the jeremiads of the administration's media allies at every stage — violence levels have not risen, a thoroughly democratic election has occurred (for the first time in the Muslim Arab world), economic growth is high, and Joe Biden, winning the Al Gore Trophy for political revisionism and invention, is claiming Iraq as "one of the great foreign-policy successes of this administration." It is not a crowded field of contenders, but, ironically, he may finally be correct.

But the greater irony, greater even than Robert Gates's successful execution of a policy he opposed on the Iraq Study Group, is that Hillary Clinton has so successfully undone her husband's nonsensical Pakistan-India policy. Apart from the unspeakable fiasco in Honduras, where the U.S. aligned itself with Chávez and the Castros and against constitutional democracy (which, fortunately, prevailed anyway), she has been a capable secretary of state.

Bill Clinton purported to boycott Pakistan and India when both became nuclear powers, a policy George W. Bush revisited when Osama bin Laden and other terrorists took refuge in Pakistan. Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf played the U.S. for a fool, and provided only minimal cooperation, but the Bush administration did sponsor substantive improvements in India-Pakistan relations, which had been militantly hostile since the founding of the two countries in 1947.

The nuclear treaty with India and the steady warming of relations between India and Pakistan, the replacement of Musharraf by an elected government, the aggressions within Pakistan of the Islamic extremists, and direct U.S. support for the Pakistani armed forces have radically altered the correlation of forces in the campaign against terrorists.

Since the death of the country's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in 1948, the Pakistani army has been the chief influence in the country whether holding the presidency (as it has for most of that time) or not. All Pakistani leaders since Jinnah, whether military or civilian, have been forced out of office in an unconstitutional process, either sent packing or assassinated. The top-level visit of the Pakistan army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, to Washington last week, as his powerful army finally leads a determined effort to root the terrorists out of their mountain hideouts, is a triumph of U.S. diplomacy by administrations of both parties.

This will ramify far beyond the decline of the terrorist threat — to the assembly of an association of states of countervailing influence to China's in South and East Asia, an indigenous balance of power that the U.S. can maintain at acceptable cost. Along with the fine political and economic progress of Indonesia, it will start to lift the Muslim world clear of extreme and primitive theocratic influences.

This is not the end of U.S. diplomatic eccentricities, as President Obama's visit to Afghanistan to snub Pres. Hamid Karzai in his own country and the ludicrous dust-up with Netanyahu over the sideshow of West Bank settlements have shown in the last two weeks. Despite the bouncing-football nature of some U.S. foreign-policy making, with inconsistencies and political claptrap that at times seem to simulate The Gong Show, the prospects raised and strengthened by General Kayani's trip to Washington are likely to be dazzling achievements. There will be credit enough for everyone, even Joe Biden, now jostling in the line just behind Bill Clinton to follow Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Barack Obama at the sausage-making window of Nobel Peace Prizes for placatory Democratic national officeholders.

– 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