Nov
20
No, not Sarah Palin’s which were very reasonable in my book, but Obama’s lilling off the peace process by insisting on settlements being part of the debate. Charles Krauthammer via The Corner:
Apart from what anybody thinks about the virtue of settlement, the ideological import of it, look at the historical fact. For 16 years, in the absence of a freeze of settlements, there were negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. In fact, a year ago Abbas, the leader of the Palestinians, was deep in negotiations with the Israeli prime minister at a time when there was an increase in settlements.
So it was Obama who comes in. He calls for a settlement freeze. The Palestinians, of course, endorse it, and then say that unless Israel imposes a freeze, that there won’t be any negotiations.
This was a self-inflicted wound on the part of the administration, completely unnecessary, and that’s what has stopped the negotiations.
More genius foreign policy.
Nov
5
(Un)Smart Power
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 3 Comments
In terms of silly little mistakes, this administration is seriously incompetent when it comes to foreign policy (and incompetent on the big stuff too although that is by capitulative design.
First there was the cock-up over the gifts to Gordon Brown. The mis-translated “reset” button to Russia, which was not only incompetent but juvenile too. There was the informing of Poland of the abandonment of the missile shield on the anniversary of their invasion by Russia and his classic letter to ex-President Chirac in which he hoped “that we will be able to work together, in the coming four years, in a spirit of peace and friendship to build a safer world”.
And now Hillary Clinton doesn’t even know the details of Israeli-Palestinian relations, hoping that the new Israeli capital will be in East Jerusalem (ie the bit with all the Palestinians in it):
And in a new twist Tuesday, Clinton made what appeared to be an inadvertent slip of the tongue in a television interview with the al-Jazeera network, referring to the goal of “an Israeli capital in east Jerusalem.”
It has not been U.S. policy to favor including east Jerusalem in an Israeli capital; the Palestinians claim it as their capital, and the issue is one of the most important and delicate points that would have to be settled in any final peace deal between the two parties.
Two Clinton aides monitoring the interview alerted her to the mistake and that portion of the interview was retaped so she could correct herself.
Nicolas Sarkozy thinks Obama is naive. To be frank, that’s putting it mildly. his whole administration naive, indecisive and lacking in basic diplomatic competence.
Nov
3
Stalled At Home, Stalled Abroad
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 1 Comment
Despite a change mantra, a supposed mandate from the people, an electoral majority and international good wishes, Barack Obama’s agenda is one that has stalled badly.
In domestic politics, Cap and Trade has been stuck in Senatorial limbo for a number of months whilst health care reform, originally expected to be passed in August is still struggling to come to the floor in both houses, nevermind passed. And although he successfully passed a stimulus package early, the average American is seeing little gain from all that spending as unemployment exceeded Obama’s target by 2%.
But Obama’s agenda has stalled internationally too. The administration has got itself in a mess over Israeli settlements, initially alienating Israeli’s by demanding an end to settlements but then backtracking and creating a sense of betrayal amongst Palestinian leaders and the Arab world:
The Palestinian leadership immediately rejected Mrs Clinton’s demand to return to negotiations without a resolution on the settlements issue and gave warning that the peace process was “in a state of paralysis”.
“The result of Israel’s intransigence and America’s back-peddling is that there is no hope for negotiations on the horizon,” said Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian leader.
There has been little improvement on the Iran issue too. The unilateral abandonment of missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic was supposed to bring Russia to the sanctions table:
All of this good cheer is now over. Lavrov greeted Clinton in Moscow with the bad news: “At the current stage, all forces should be thrown at supporting the negotiating process. … Threats, sanctions and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive.”
And Iran isn’t playing ball, rejecting a much touted agreement to send nuclear material to Russia for enrichment. In fact, Obama’s resetting of relations with Russia has seen a Russia not only flexing it’s muscles, but its nuclear muscles too.
Similarly, on climate change, on international stimulus, North Korea and more NATO troops in Afghanistan this administration has failed to even move the ball forward.
It is true that evaluating foreign policy in the short term is difficult, foreign policy is a matter of small steps; unfortunately whatever steps have been made have been backwards ones. This is an administration whose agenda, particularly on global matters, is being defined by its inertia.
The previous administration was castigated for its foreign policy failures, Obama offered an antidote but America second is not necessarily a useful antonym to Bush’s America first policy:
Barack Obama has arrived at a terrible moment of truth in foreign policy. He has done little to make these four crises less critical. Americans knew that electing Obama, a man without any real experience in foreign affairs, was a risk. But the widespread feeling was that he couldn’t do worse than George W. Bush, who had bequeathed him all these miserable situations. Well, he hasn’t done worse than Bush, but he hasn’t accomplished much either. And now we will see whether he and his team can pull themselves together and fashion a strategy that allows the United States to head off, or at least better roll with, the inevitable international punches-until conditions ripen for the effective application of American power.
Oct
28
The UN Continues To Demonstrate It’s Ga-Ga Land Alternate Reality
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 14 Comments
Using drone strikes against terrorist enemies of the United States now apparently breaks international law because it carries out “summary executions”:
US drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan could be breaking international laws against summary executions, the UN’s top investigator of such crimes said.
“The problem with the United States is that it is making an increased use of drones/Predators (which are) particularly prominently used now in relation to Pakistan and Afghanistan,” UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions Philip Alston told a press conference.
“My concern is that drones/Predators are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law,” he said.
The United Nations is a laughable excuse as an organisation. Still, as an international war criminal, it’s probably time for Obama to hand back that peace prize.
Oct
14
A Peace Prize That Brings Thermonuclear War
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 1 Comment
JFK’s first meeting with Khrushchev was considered a disaster, one that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis. Are we seeing more of the same?
Russia has just revealed it’s new nuclear doctrine and it’s not pretty.
Russia is weighing changes to its military doctrine that would allow for a “preventive” nuclear strike against its enemies — even those armed only with conventional weapons. The news comes just as American diplomats are trying to get Russia to cut down its nuclear stockpile, and put the squeeze on Iran’s suspect nuclear program.
In an interview published today in Izvestia, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Kremlin’s security council, said the new doctrine offers “different options to allow the use of nuclear weapons, depending on a certain situation and intentions of a would-be enemy. In critical national security situations, one should also not exclude a preventive nuclear strike against the aggressor.”
What’s more, Patrushev said, Russia is revising the rules for the employment of nukes to repel conventionally armed attackers, “not only in large-scale, but also in a regional and even a local war.”
Preventative nuclear strikes? The use of nuclear weapons against conventional local enemies? Russia is an aggressive belligerent bully and Obama’s toadying on missile defense has given it even more reason to up the ante. And is it just a coincidence that this announcement is timed within a week of Obama’s peace prize and coinciding with Hillary’s visit to Moscow?
You don’t stand up to bullies by handing over your lunch money without a whimper. There’s a reason why soft power is called “soft”.
Oct
14
Might We Be Witnessing The End Of Progressivism?
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 20 Comments
I have an admittedly unscientifically tested theory that overreach by political parties often lead to the death, at least temporarily, of the values those parties represent. So for example, Thatcher’s neo-liberal conservatism hasn’t graced our shores since the Poll Tax, the demise of Gordon Brown will most probably lead to the demise of statism and nation building foreign wars will be much harder to sell to the American public following the unpopularity of Bush’s policies. I’ve always felt that the radical progressivism demonstrated by the Pelosi-Obama pact would take progressivism in that same direction, but two stories really spelled that out for me.
The first was in Russia. Following Obama’s decision to axe the missile shield in Eastern Europe and some subsequent positive noises from Medveyedev about sanctions on Iran, some liberal commentators argued that the two were related, that Obama’s soft policy approach won over Russia to his cause. Following Hillary’s visit to Moscow, that seems to be premature.
As is being reported, Russia has shown itself to be much more reluctant to contemplate sanctions than initially advertised:
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stressed Tuesday that Washington and Moscow are working together to ensure Iran’s nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes, but Russia has stopped short of committing to Iranian sanctions.
Speaking to reporters after a closed-door meeting, Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov indicated there has been no agreement between the countries on any sort of sanctions plan, even though Russia is not opposed to sanctions in principle.
…
Lavrov said that sometimes sanctions theoretically need to be imposed when all diplomatic efforts are exhausted — but not in the case of Iran.
“Threats, sanctions and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive,” he said.
I still maintain that giving up the missile shield without getting anything in return from Russia shows weak foreign policy, a case of lying back and thinking of transnationalism whilst being shafted by Russia. But it is the progressive way, the belief that a countries own interests should be subordinated for what they believe is the greater good; a transnational governance and a naive belief in an ephemeral world peace. Think of it as the Miss World approach to foreign policy. And I don’t believe that the American public at large are ready to have their interests subordinated to world courts and the United Nations, America is a country with a well defined self-confidence and Presidents who ignore that do so at their peril, think Jimmy Carter, and that is what Obama’s grovelling approach to foreign affairs will undermine.
The second article is related to healthcare. Yesterday the Max Baucus plan passed out of the finance committee, another step on the road to a transformative health care reform. There are still many hoops to jump through to get it passed and there was much discussion about whether it will. Megan McCardle thinks it will, but that it will be a disaster:
I think it is more likely is that this thing passes, and fails spectacularly. There are too many moving parts, and if any of them breaks, the whole thing rapidly starts to spin out of control and eat a gigantic hole in the deficit. If it does break, I think that Democrats keep control of Congress just long enough to explain why they keep having to enact whopping new tax increases every few years. Republicans don’t need to improve their message. They just have to wait for Democrats to recover their reputation as tax and spend politicians who woefully under-predict the cost of everything they propose.
To radically transform health care in the United States, the democrats are having to thread too many needles. They have to keep the liberals happy, they need to accommodate moderate Democrats, they need to try to ensure the bill gets some bi-partisan cover from Republicans and they need to keep their special interest groups on side. An example of this is the trade union opposition to the Max Baucus plan. So what was a well intentioned but badly thought out plan in the first place will be fiddled about with and compromised on to try to placate all the relevant parties. And on top of that, there are seven different proposals that all need to be reconciled. I’d suggest that there’s a very good chance that the eventual bill will become a Frankenstein’s monster; a mish-mash of different parts bolted together on the fly that the creators will quickly lose control of. As an example of this, one only needs to look at the Max Baucus plan. To square the circle of keeping the bill from further increasing the deficit, Max Baucus had to write in a couple of provisions that have no chance of being enacted in reality. Firstly, the bill requires a 15% cut in Medicare compensation for Doctors, and secondly, it requires cuts to both Medicare and Medicaid. Does anyone really believe that politicians will be brave enough to make those cuts? I don’t, and this means that the Baucus plan goes from being one that marginally improves the deficit situation to one one that makes it much worse.
So domestically, on top of expanding deficits, a GM buyout that has become a hole into which more money needs to be poured and a stimulus that has failed to stimulate is a health care bill confused by it’s need to cater to all the competing interests. As Megan McCardle notes, this may well end up as a disastrous bill. And if that is the case, as a premier liberal and progressive shibboleth, it will tarnish progressivism in the mind of an increasingly sceptical public, one that has been naturally suspicious of tax and spend liberalism since the end of the sixties.
The incumbent radical progressives have staked their reputation on a massive increase on the size of the state and a foreign policy that raises the interests of internationalism above those of America. Those two policy directions have proved to be unpopular in the past and I don’t see any evidence for that changing. Just as the Brits tired of Thatcherite Conservatism and Brownite statism, I can see the American public tiring of radical progressivism. It might not be for eight years, but the liberal can expect a lengthy period in the wilderness following Obama.
The question is, will it be too late or America by then?
Oct
10
Our Man In Honduras
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 6 Comments
Jim DeMint has visited Honduras, despite the efforts of the Democrats to stop him. His report back, in the Wall Street Journal, is informative:
While in Honduras, I spoke to dozens of Hondurans, from nonpartisan members of civil society to former Zelaya political allies, from Supreme Court judges to presidential candidates and even personal friends of Mr. Zelaya. Each relayed stories of a man changed and corrupted by power. The evidence of Mr. Zelaya’s abuses of presidential power—and his illegal attempts to rewrite the Honduran Constitution, a la Hugo Chávez—is not only overwhelming but uncontroverted.
As all strong democracies do after cleansing themselves of usurpers, Honduras has moved on.
The presidential election is on schedule for Nov. 29. Under Honduras’s one-term-limit, Mr. Zelaya could not have sought re-election anyway. Current President Roberto Micheletti—who was installed after Mr. Zelaya’s removal, per the Honduran Constitution—is not on the ballot either. The presidential candidates were nominated in primary elections almost a year ago, and all of them—including Mr. Zelaya’s former vice president—expect the elections to be free, fair and transparent, as has every Honduran election for a generation.
Indeed, the desire to move beyond the Zelaya era was almost universal in our meetings. Almost.
In a day packed with meetings, we met only one person in Honduras who opposed Mr. Zelaya’s ouster, who wishes his return, and who mystifyingly rejects the legitimacy of the November elections: U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens.
The Obama administration are blocking the release of the legal reasons for their support of Zelaya (the most transparent administration ever?) which leaves one wondering the reason for their interference in this matter. Was it simply their inexperience and incompetence that caused the knee-jerk opposition to the change in Honduras, a mistake that their arrogance now won’t allow them to pull back on, or is there more to it? They have put themselves on the side of Hugo Chavez. Why?
Oct
6
Democracy In Iran
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 4 Comments
Isn’t worth keeping an eye on nowadays.
The Obama administration has withdrawn funding from the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. This isn’t a human rights activist organisation seeking to blatantly promote human rights in Iran, it is simply a watchdog taking on the responsibility of tracking human rights violations in Iran. One would think that would be a fairly important program at this time, following the dishonest election there and the ensuing violent put down of protests and the imprisonment of political enemies.
An indication of the good work this agency does:
The group has published 12 reports in English and Persian about the forced confessions of detained bloggers and journalists, the 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners, and the Iranian government’s campaign to assassinate dissidents abroad. Although the State Department has been the group’s main source of funds, the Canadian government granted it money to research human-rights abuses in the wake of the disputed election this year.
Currently, the group is working to develop a list of all those who were arrested following the election and a list of those responsible for alleged abuses in prison.
Not for much longer though:
But without additional funding, the group will shut down in May when its funding runs out, Redman said.
Isn’t it strange that this comes only a week after the talks with Iran? Some quid pro quo? First there was the announcement that for the first time since the early nineties, an American President has refused to meet the Dalai Lama, and now this. If this agency was a neo-conservative action group determined to actively promote democracy in Iran I could understand it. But for the Obama administration to try to prevent the monitoring of abuses in that country, possibly, and seemingly likely, at the request of the Iranian government. Even Alex Massie disapproves:
Because otherwise this looks shabby and, actually, terrible. Realism is fine but realism doesn’t have to be granite-hearted to the point it becomes embarrassed by talk of human rights and the careful documentation of such abuses.
Personally I think it’s shameful.
Oct
4
Obama’s War
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 16 Comments
A 24 minute trailer to a new series about Afghanistan on P.B.S. Very interesting and well worth watching.
Oct
2
Are The Iran Talks Going Well?
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 1 Comment
The West seem to have got some concessions out of Iran following their talks yesterday:
Iran agreed on Thursday in talks with the United States and other major powers to open its newly revealed uranium enrichment plant near Qum to international inspection in the next two weeks and to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium outside Iran to be turned into fuel for a small reactor that produces medical isotopes, senior American and other Western officials said.
However, as even the American negotiators admit, this may well be a “hollow” promise:
If Iran has secret stockpiles of enriched uranium, however, the accomplishment would be hollow, a senior American official conceded.
I’m no student of the Vietnam war, but I wonder if Iran will play these ongoing talks like the North Vietnamese did the Paris talks. There, they made vague promises as a way of assessing America’s convictions. As America sought compromises and made promises as part of the negotiating process, North Vietnam were able to assess America’s lack of conviction, both politically and domestically, for an all out win. America’s problems in negotiating with Iran are made worse by the international nature of the negotiations. Europe, Russia and China are all going o have to see things in the same way America does, and for Russia and China, any desire for punitive actions against Iran are reluctant at best. So as Iran offer concessions, there is the risk of a wedge being driven in between the long-term negotiating partners.
They got more out of these one-day talks than I thought they might but I think that most parties realise that Iran are playing a game here. They are the most potent Middle-Eastern country right now, they’re not going to give that up easily, and bowing down to international pressure will most surely weaken them in the eyes of fellow Middle-Eastern countries. However, by giving up something, Iran may well have bought themselves some time against Israeli attack; the west will pressure Israel not to attack Iran as Iran are giving up concessions.
One final question. should Iran’s support for terrorist organisations be on the table?