Carter was dazed. He had come as a Light into the world to save it, and now the world had rejected him. Why was his magnanimity sneered at as weakness rather than appreciated and reciprocated with good will? Did these ungrateful countries not realize that they were only making American realpolitikers and reactionaries look good — and thus undermining a rare American internationalist who was more a citizen of the world?
Then all of a sudden Carter flipped. By January 1980 there was a new Carter Doctrine, warning the Soviet Union that the Persian Gulf would be protected by force if necessary. Saudi Arabia may have been a misogynist, fundamentalist, and autocratic monarchy, but human-rights advocate Jimmy Carter declared it was central to Western interests and vowed to protect the Saudi royals.
In an effort to embarrass Moscow, the host of the 1980 Summer Olympics, for the first and only time in history America boycotted the games. Carter stopped the Nixon détente practice of exporting U.S. grain to the Soviet Union. He began arming the rebels in Afghanistan. He hiked defense spending up well over 4 percent of GDP — and well over the levels that had been promised by the hawkish rival presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1976. Cyrus Vance and Andrew Young both had left the administration by then. Carter stopped sending appeasing envoys to Iran. He suggested that he would not rule out another effort to rescue the hostages, even though his first attempt had failed miserably.
Will Obama follow the Carter script? His foreign policy, like Carter’s in late 1979, is wrecked. Vladimir Putin saw Obama’s trashing of George W. Bush and loud boasts about “reset” as weakness to be exploited, not as outreach to be matched. Any former Soviet republic that has a large minority of Russian speakers feels that it is next in line for Putin’s bullying — and does not believe Barack Obama’s now-empty “step-over lines,” “red lines,” or “deadlines.”
Obama’s outreach to Latin American Marxists was a colossal failure. Venezuela is now a failed state — with one of the world’s largest reserves of oil. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega humiliated Obama with a long public dressing down. Cuba, Ecuador, and Argentina are more anti-American than ever.
Secretary of State John Kerry believes the chief challenge to the world is global warming, although the planet’s temperature has remained unchanged for nearly two decades, even as carbon emissions have soared. The Great Lakes are frozen over as the president claims global warming is “settled science.”
The Middle East is a mess. The United States’ heroic effort to stabilize Iraq was thrown away when Obama yanked out all U.S. troops after the success of the surge. Afghanistan, where more U.S. soldiers have died in Obama’s five years than in Bush’s seven, is on the path of Vietnam in early 1975.
Iran will get the bomb. All the efforts to achieve an effective boycott have been abandoned willy-nilly without any Iranian concessions.
Red lines in Syria only empowered Assad and Putin. The corpses pile up, and the idea of the Russians and Syrians accounting for WMD is a cruel joke.
Libya is Somalia on the Mediterranean, a failed state that looks across to Europe. So does Egypt, where we at one time or another have backed and then withdrawn support from three successive regimes — and tuned out the once lavishly praised Arab Spring.
Relations with Israel are at an all-time low. Our special relationship with Turkey only green-lighted Recep Erdogan’s efforts to undermine democracy and Islamicize his country.
Our efforts to reduce our strategic arsenal in association with Vladimir Putin, together with our new Hamlet-like stance towards China, have terrified our Pacific allies. In the next three years, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (and perhaps the Philippines and Australia as well) will either make concessions to China or threaten to go nuclear — if their suspicions continue to grow that they are no longer under the U.S. strategic umbrella.
So will Obama try to reverse course, like Carter did? Hanson thinks it is not likely.
More likely we will see a doubling down on reducing U.S. influence — with the end of reshaping a too-prominent global profile, which itself was supposedly a result of unfairly acquired advantage.
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