Perhaps the Obama-Clinton concept of Smart Power is just too sophisticated for my limited conservative brain. For there is nothing smart about it, and it seems like code for avoiding the use of any kind of power. The first tip off came from the fact that it is winning high praise among those who have long detested any manifestation of US power: the Europeans and the UN. The second tip off is that the earliest manifestations of Smart Power could not have been dumber.
There was slamist e in which he offered to negotiate and help it “take its rightful place among the community of nations.” The speech reminded me a lot of his famous Philadelphia speech during the campaign. Obama was going to somehow explain his relationship with anti-US, anti-Semitic preacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But instead he was allowed to wax poetically and make the election a referendum on race in the United States. No substance, but it sure sounded pretty. So, since it worked on us, it appeared he would try it out on the Iranians. How smart has that turned out to be? A day after the speech, former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and long time diplomat Nicholas Burns was asked about it on the BBC. To Burns’ credit, he refused to take relentless BBC bait to trash former President George W Bush, which many former officials have taken up with relish. But he also praised Obama’s effort and said it “would put the Iranians on the defensive” by forcing them either to accept the offer or isolate themselves further. Yet the very next day, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei turned that around with a point that more Americans should have made before casting their votes this past November. He said that Obama’s words were fine, but words mean nothing unless they are backed up with action and that they would judge Obama’s veracity by what he does. In other words, Khamenei put
America on the defensive. He put the ball back in Obama’s court, and he must either act or appear disingenuous. Strike One.
Worse still, Obama gave Iranian hard-liners and President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad a gift they could never have managed themselves. Iranians will soon be going to the polls, and Ahmedinejad and his crowd were expecting to take quite a hit given the terrible state of the Iranian economy. Now, however, they are making a lot of noise that it was they who made Obama’s plea (which is exactly it is seen here in Asia) possible. ‘Do you really think,’ they are asking, ‘that the US president would have come crawling to us after 30 years if we had given up our march toward nuclear weapons? Or our principled support for Palestinian “freedom fighters?’ And they also are touting it as a defeat for “the Jewish lobby.” A lot of Iranians think they’re right, too. Strike Two.
More smart power came around the same time when Obama said he was interested in finding “moderate Taliban.” There are people I am working with in South Asia who have faced the brutality that some of those “moderates” have provided to their communities and had been looking to the United States to be the champion that would help their Indian government finally take a stand against terrorism and inter-communal strife that is growing here daily. They felt betrayed and discouraged by Obama’s statement and wonder it the US is really the moral beacon they believed it to be. And just today, Obama’s “new approach” was praised by the Pakistani Foreign Minister—the same one who ceded his country’s Swat Valley to the Taliban who are in the process of imposing Sharia law just 100 miles from the Pakistani capital. As that is happening, the remnant of Pakistan’s Hindu population is fleeing just ahead of the scimitar into India’s Punjab state. Strike Three.
One of our greatest barriers in overcoming Islamists is their boast that we have no moral staying power; that we are a shallow, consumer society that will perish. They on the other hand represent moral strength that in the end will triumph. These manifestations of Not-so-smart power make them seem prescient and are going to win the Taliban more recruits than they every got from Bush. In fact, the language of our new administration is conspicuous for its absence of words like victory; it seems that we have given up the very notion that radical Islam (oops, we’re not supposed to say that, either) should be defeated.
The last time this happened to the United States was during the 1960s and 1970s. During the administrations of Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmie Carter, the United States defined its struggle with the Soviet Union in rather ambiguous terms; ambiguous actions followed, and much of the world saw our march toward socialism inexorable. Then came US President Ronald Reagan who changed the nature of how the United States would henceforth view its fight with international communism when he publicly defined the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” When he did that, political opponents on the left, academics, and even from some in his own party rained torrents of criticism upon him; but not the American people. Most average Americans found Reagan’s candor refreshing. We had grown up in the shadow of a possible nuclear holocaust because of that evil empire, and we didn’t like it. We liked the perceived drop in tensions from previous decades but deep down knew that it was temporary and who our enemy was. Ronald Reagan made it okay to name it again.
That same resolve to fight
this war was apparent in the United States after 9/11. All of a sudden we experienced what countries like India and Israel had been experiencing for some time at the hands of Islamist radicals.
And we didn’t like it. But in the latter years of the Bush Administration and the first 60 days of the Obama Administration, we seem to have lost our way; lost that edge. In fact, the growing opinion in India is that from being the beacon against Islamist terror, the United States now is content to sacrifice others for the illusion of safety. Obamamania is fading fast here among large segments of the population.
The world can only pray that Obama or the person who follows him develop the same strength of character that Ronald Reagan had and will unequivocally and openly define today’s evil empire as
Islamist terrorists, for that is what they are. And
that is really smart power.
