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A View From Utopia: Imagining Obama's Foreign Policy

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  • A View From Utopia: Imagining Obama's Foreign Policy

    A VIEW FROM UTOPIA: IMAGINING OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY
    Victor Davis Hanson

    Jewish Press, NY
    April 30 2008

    We know the critique of present American foreign policy under George
    W. Bush - unilateralist and preemptive - and to some extent we know
    Sen. Obama's promised corrective - multilateral and reflective. So
    let's take a serious look at what exactly is wrong with the former,
    and how things would substantially improve under the latter.

    Let's start with India. Indians poll pro-American by wide margins,
    due no doubt to America's unnecessary coddling of the world's largest
    democracy. If Sen. Obama acts on his complaints about the outsourcing
    of U.S. jobs to India and institutes his anti-NAFTA preferences in
    U.S. trade relations, India may finally receive the tough love it's
    been needing.

    After all, didn't President Bush give away the nuclear game with
    India? Perhaps a President Obama will back out of existing agreements
    in order to ensure that India does not receive advanced nuclear
    technology. (In recompense, they'll have little reason to complain,
    relatively speaking: Sen. Obama has suggested the U.S. should
    preemptively invade our ally Pakistan in order to hunt down Osama
    bin Laden.)

    And China - what are we doing wrong there? Its increasing appetite for
    world resources means it cares not a whit what happens in the Sudan,
    as long as it gets its oil. Some Chinese products, as Sen. Obama
    reminds us, are shoddy and sometimes dangerous, no doubt a result of
    our indiscriminate free-trade policy. The way China treats Tibetans
    and Uyghur Muslims violates canons of human decency.

    Will a President Obama protect American jobs, champion human rights,
    and ensure fair and safe trade by redefining our relationship with
    China, which holds a trillion dollars in U.S. government bonds?

    Anti-Americanism runs rampant in Europe. Under an Obama administration,
    should we expect friendlier governments than Sarkozy's France
    or Merkel's Germany? Perhaps Obama might cancel that provocative
    missile-defense system in Eastern Europe designed to stop an Iranian
    nuclear guided missile.

    Or will Sen. Obama try to save American jobs by nullifying contracts
    with the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. to provide refueling
    tankers to the U.S. Air Force? We can be sure he will embrace the
    emissions-reduction targets set in the Kyoto accords; in that way,
    he will encourage Europeans to do the same, since their repeated
    failures in meeting their promised reductions must surely be laid at
    Mr. Bush's feet. The EU has been waiting for America to show the way.

    Then there is Russia. Surely Obama will do something about Putin,
    who seemed too cozy with Bush while he hijacked Russian democracy and
    used his oil to bully Europe. Perhaps Obama can craft an ingenious
    speech that will persuade the Kremlin's ex-KGB kleptocrats to act
    more civilly in the world, especially concerning their trafficking
    with the likes of Iran and Syria.

    Speaking of the Middle East, how will Obama restore American prestige
    there and ameliorate the damage done in the Bush years? Perhaps he
    could send Nancy Pelosi back to Syria to engage Mr. Assad? Or ask
    the Democratic Congress to condemn Turkey for the Armenian genocide?

    Will Obama's fast-track pullout of Iraq, and his willingness to sit
    down, without preconditions, with the mullahs of Iran, assure stability
    in the region, and win the confidence of our Arab allies? Sens. Obama
    and Clinton have both written epitaphs for the surge: why, then,
    continue a failed policy?

    Once Americans are out of Iraq by mid-2009, Iraqis themselves,
    as Afghans, Cambodians, Somalis, Rwandans, and Yugoslavs have done
    before them, can work out their differences on their own. And since we
    were always the gratuitous targets that created terrorists ex nihilo,
    no doubt Dr. Zawahiri and President Ahmadinejad will move on to other
    Great Satans, once they see that those provocative American GIs have
    turned tail and fled their neighborhoods.

    Since it is self-evident that the absence of another 9/11-like
    attack here at home was a fluke - and had nothing to do either with
    Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, wiretaps, the destruction of Al Qaeda
    bases in Afghanistan, or the annihilation of Wahhabi terrorists in
    Iraq - President Obama will be free to shut down all such legally
    dubious homeland-security measures. This will reassure Americans and
    Europeans that those efforts were both unnecessary and antithetical to
    our values. There never was, and won't be, any danger of another 9/11.

    Since NAFTA was a sellout of American workers, President Obama can,
    as he seems to promise, withdraw from the association and restore
    tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, while ending our xenophobic
    paranoia about "secure borders" - especially silly ideas like fences
    and walls. There would be no need to extend NAFTA-like accords
    to Colombia, and we should also reexamine sweetheart deals with
    Middle-Eastern countries like Jordan.

    The world between 1992-2000 is the model we are to emulate,
    it seems. The world was much safer then before George W. Bush's
    indiscriminate wars and it can be so again. In those golden days,
    the U.S. rightly contextualized "random" terrorist acts - making the
    proper distinctions between war and "police matters."

    Yes, it's true that thousands of American soldiers died in those
    peaceful days - about 7,500 between 1993-2000 - but they did so in
    noncombatant-related operations. Back then, our experts appreciated
    the hard lines and firewalls that separated Hizbullah from Iran,
    Sunni terrorists from Shiite killers, and were always careful not to
    overreact and turn mere responses into needless wars.

    In extremis, we can employ tried-and-true tools like no-fly zones,
    oil-for-food embargoes, UN sanctions, and the occasional cruise
    missile, avoiding the mess of President Karzai's Afghanistan or
    President Maliki's Iraq, and the peripheral blowback involving a
    jittery Libya, Syria, and Pakistan's Dr. A. Q. Khan.

    Presently the United States does the world's heavy lifting under
    a Texan who says "nucular." But soon it may well be charmed and
    mesmerized by a smooth-talking icon who raises trade barriers,
    leaves the Middle East to the Middle East, gets tough on China and
    India, relaxes relations with Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela,
    while redefining existing ones with Pakistan - and says to Europe,
    "We're right behind you!"

    Let's hope it will be as pleasant to see the results as it has been
    to listen to the utopian rhetoric.

    Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution,
    the author of several bestselling works of nonfiction including,
    most recently, "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans
    Fought the Peloponnesian War," and a regular contributor to National
    Review Online, where this essay first appeared.
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