Talk about isolationism, Barack Obama in 2014 might as well be Charles Lindbergh in 1939 warning against getting involved in the age-old struggle between the nations of Europe. What concern should all that be to us an ocean away? Or as Neville Chamberlain would put it on his way to sell the Czechs out at Munich in 1938, why get involved in a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing? Hey, the world has always been messy. Ignore it and maybe itll go away. All this exaggerated uproar is just the medias fault, anyway. If you watch the nightly news, the president complained the other day, it feels like the world is falling apart. Maybe because it is? Nope, hes got everything under control despite all appearances -- even if he was caught for a while without a strategy to deal with his latest Crisis of the Day. This one was set off by an outfit that calls itself the Islamic State, and has been metastasizing all over Syria and what used to be Iraq. Now the president is telling us the country needs to go to war again, but not really. With predictable results. For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle?--Corinthians 1-4. Oh, if only the nervous nellies in the press would quiet down. To adapt a line from that foreign-policy sage, Ring Lardner: Shut up, he explained. Meanwhile, the Russian bear is chewing away at the edges of Europe, and not just the edges. The latest additions to a revived Soviet empire accumulate so fast they begin to resemble the spread of Hitlers Reich in the sleepy Thirties, which inevitably led to the anything but sleepy Forties and the bloodiest of wars in the worlds history. Much the same prelude to disaster mounts in Europe today: First the bear bites off a small sliver of Moldova, then hunks of Georgia, followed by all of Crimea, and now a healthy helping of eastern Ukraine. ... Ronald Reagan once compared the old Soviet Union to a hotel burglar who proceeds down the corridor trying one room after another till he finds one with the door unlocked and proceeds to ransack it. It helps if the house dick is snoozing downstairs, or, in Detective Obamas case, too busy raising campaign funds to take foreign policy seriously. There really oughta be a law, or at least an unspoken rule, against criticizing this presidents foreign policy, if you could call it a policy. Much like the sportsmans rule against shooting sitting ducks. Its no challenge. Its so much easier to sit back and criticize its glaring defects than to offer an alternative. If only our leaders had some historical consciousness, they could just leaf through any history of American diplomacy (instead of relegating it to a museum) and find any number of examples to follow -- and beware. There was old John Adams keeping the peace with France instead of yielding to provocation and leading the country into an inconclusive war like that of 1812. (He left that misadventure to the Jeffersonians who followed him in the White House.) Or look to how Abraham Lincoln saved the Union by letting its erring states in the South go one after another, giving up Fort Pickens in Florida and even the Little Rock armory here in Arkansas. Instead, he would let the South bear the onus of starting the War Between the States at Fort Sumter. The moral of that story: Diplomacy doesnt require just force but judgment. There are any number of historical examples of how to lead -- and how not to. Franklin D. Roosevelt had to know that the spreading wars in Europe and Asia in his time would inevitably affect this nation, too, but that president also knew he would have to prepare a deeply isolationist America for it slowly, step by step, from Lend Lease to reviving the draft. Right up to the fateful morning Japan made the decision for us on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. But this president doesnt have to bring American public opinion along; it already seems far ahead of him, more aware of the growing dangers abroad than he is. He neednt lead at this point, just wake up. An example of both what to do and not to do is offered by a single president: Woodrow Wilson. It may be forgotten now, but his campaign slogan in 1916 (He kept us out of war!) was actually justified at the time -- the year before he got us into the First World War. Till then he had kept us out of it by a series of well-balanced measures like Armed Neutrality to stave off the German U-boats that threatened, and occasionally attacked, American ships. And yet they kept on supplying our informal British allies. But then that president gave way to provocation -- and grandiose visions -- by announcing a war to make the world safe for democracy. It didnt. Neither did it prove the war to end war as advertised, but only the preface to an even more devastating one. There are no easy answers in diplomacy, no matter how simple it once looked to our current president, who seemed to believe all he had to do was declare our good intentions, extend the hand of friendship to the old mullahs and new tsars all around the world, and all would be well in his fairy-tale version of international affairs. Has he learned any better since? Maybe not. Illusions, like ideology, are hard to shake. But that rumble you hear is the world trembling under his feet after hes neglected it for so long. Is it too much to hope hell wake up at last? The country already has. If only it could get the word to the White House. Read more at jewishworldreview/cols/greenberg091014.php3#l7sy6bWHTTCSUQDf.99
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 15:27:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015