How Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton lost 70 years of American postwar deterrence in the Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

Nations in the Middle East that once aligned with America are now indifferent. Interests who opposed the United States grow defiant. Fence-sitting countries that calibrated their policies to the perception of U.S. strength are leaning toward our adversaries. Chaos is the result.

...The American estrangement from the Gulf States is a result of near U.S. independence in gas and oil production, the collapse of the global oil market, and the Obama administration’s tilt toward Iran. That American realignment was interpreted in the Gulf as staged indifference to radical Shiite efforts to undermine the Gulf Sunni monarchies. Most Sunni states are prepping for the likelihood of a new Middle-East arms race in a soon to be nuclear neighborhood.

The only upside is an emerging de facto alliance between Israel and the so-called moderate Arab monarchies. That odd coupling assumes that Iran threatens both more than they do each other, and that the United States is no longer a reliable patron to either.

...Three landmark events over the last four years fueled the general Middle East chaos.

The Libya Disaster
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and National Security Council staffer Samantha Power all pushed for an easy air campaign against Libya. The Obama administration had recently been flummoxed by unrest in Egypt and embarrassed by its disastrous tilt toward Mohamed Morsi, who by spring 2012 had sought to manipulate democratic elections as a means of turning Egypt into an Islamic state.

Yet Libya’s strongman Moammar Khadafy was a monster in rehabilitation, slowly passing power over to his Westernized progeny. That fact was ignored by the administration. Almost everything imaginable went wrong after the United States began bombing Libya. The U.S. violated UN resolutions to limit its intervention to no-fly zones and humanitarian assistance. Instead, it provided close air support to anti-Khadafy insurrectionists. Yet the administration had no intention of filling the void after the collapse of the Khadafy government.

The logical consequence of America’s bomb-and-run Libyan policy was a terrorist wasteland, an ISIS recruiting ground, the Benghazi disaster—with the ensuing wages of scandal and disinformation that continue to this day. Unwise chest-pounding such as “lead from behind,” Secretary Clinton’s crude Caesarian boast over Khadafy’s corpse (“We came, we saw, he died”), her later callous quip “what difference does it make” in congressional testimony about the American dead, and the scapegoating and jailing of a U.S.-resident video maker—these all became iconic of the entire sordid mess.

The Iraq Withdrawal
...the abrupt disappearance of thousands of American peacekeepers—40,000 were still posted there in midsummer 2011—created a catastrophic void.

...Disaffected Sunnis and scattered al Qaedists reformulated under the new ISIS brand—exploiting the furor at Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government. Without U.S. troops, Maliki had sensed no more pressure to honor commitments to the Sunni minority or to the Kurds, and thus invited in Iranian interests, essentially destroying the Iraqi military.

Obama seemed stunned by the sudden implosion of Iraq. At first in denial, he serially dismissed ISIS for the next two years, even as it insidiously carved up the Syrian-Iraq borderlands. In an infamous January 2014 interview, Obama assured the New Yorker that ISIS was a mere jayvee team: “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”

In short order, an abandoned Iraq became what South Korea probably would have looked like in 1955—had an opportunistic President Eisenhower, up for reelection in 1956, sought to blame the war on Harry Truman’s unwise intervention years earlier, and had he promised to yank out all U.S. troops from the DMZ.

Empty Redlines to Syria
The third milestone was the “red line” ultimatum to Syria’s President Bashar Assad to cease using weapons of mass destruction or face U.S. bombs. As Obama put it in August 2012, in the final stretch of his reelection campaign: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation… We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.”

When Bashar Assad—who had been ordered earlier by Obama to abdicate—used chemical weapons, Obama abruptly called off promised air strikes. Worse, Obama almost immediately denied that he had ever set a red line in the first place. On September 4, he instead blamed the United Nations and Congress for putting him on the spot: “First of all, I didn’t set a red line; the world set a red line. The world set a red line… Congress set a red line when it ratified that treaty. Congress set a red line…”

Obama appeared stunned by the notion that Assad unexpectedly had called his bluff—thus forcing an anti-war, Nobel Peace Prize laureate to preempt and bomb Syria right before the election. Yet Obama was also worried that his failure to back up his own ultimatums might confirm to the electorate perceptions of impotence.

The net result of talking loudly while carrying a twig was that friends in the region no longer counted on American assurances. Enemies sought to escalate their provocations without worrying about the consequences. Observers saw all three disastrous decisions as amateurish political miscalculations, cynically intended to win Obama dividends in the upcoming reelection bid.

In short, 70 years of American postwar deterrence in the Middle East was lost, and we have yet to see the end of the frightening consequences.

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