Topic: Decline of the West
With painful clarity, the November 13 terrorist attacks have exposed the moral and diplomatic bankruptcy of the Obama Administration. The President’s approach to foreign policy—almost Austro-Hungarian in its combination of hubris with incompetence—is not only embarrassing but dangerous. In today’s presidential press conference Obama again demonstrated his blindness to reality. He spent a lot of time describing what the US wouldn’t do, e.g. commit ground troops against ISIS, while repeatedly ducking the relevant question: What must be done to eliminate the threat posed by the Islamic state?
From the Administration and its supporters we hear the same old song: America can’t go it alone, other nations must step up to the plate, blah, blah, blah. Obama, with his touching faith in the power of chat, perhaps believes that other nations can be cajoled or shamed or scolded into action while the United States just kind of lays back and leads from behind. And, that, unfortunately, is another way of saying that he doesn’t understand what leadership is all about.
A resolute leader would tackle the problem of ISIS in precisely the opposite manner—first by making it clear that the US objective is the destruction of ISIS, second by committing the necessary resources to accomplish that objective and third by signaling that the US is prepared to act whether other nations join in or not. “Follow me,” in other words, instead of Obama’s “Can’t we all just get along?” Are you a real leader? Then you’ll set the example. Are you Obama? Then you’ll hide out in the seminar room.
Now of course there are arguments—some plausible, some not—against taking such forceful action. But notice this: Obama isn’t making them. He’s not, for example, saying that ISIS isn’t really a serious threat to US national security. As usual the President is trying to have it both ways. He calls ISIS “the face of evil” while shrinking from effective action. This is a sure-fire recipe for prolonging the war in Syria and Iraq—a war that has already created a terrible refugee problem while spreading terrorism around the world. And the longer the war goes on, the more certain it is that the United States will suffer ISIS-inspired attacks. This is all the more likely to happen if Obama’s witless policy of accepting large numbers of refugees from Syria into this country goes forward. Who doubts that among them will be ISIS jihadists intent on killing Americans?
Effective action against ISIS wouldn’t require a major deployment of ground forces on the scale of Operation Desert Storm or even Operation Iraqi Freedom. But without a commitment of ground troops sufficiently large to demonstrate US resolve, there’s no hope of building a solid anti-ISIS coalition. Other countries won’t be prepared to assume the risks from which America shrinks. I don’t have much hope, though, that these realities will ever penetrate Barack Obama’s thick skull. As Winston Churchill remarked of the British government of the 1930s, the President will “go on in strange paradox, deciding only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, solid for fluidity, adamant for drift, all-powerful to be impotent.”
