Iran must first come clean on its past nuclear activities by providing answers to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations nuclear watchdog. But if the past is any guide, there is little hope Iran will reveal its nuclear secrets. After all, it stalled IAEA attempts to get answers for more than a decade. Sanctions should have been lifted as a result of, not in exchange for, a promise of some future Iranian compliance with its transparency obligations. Given what’s at stake, the IAEA is now under pressure not to scuttle the deal. Yet the agreement does little to enhance the chances of the agency succeedings. It does not force Iran to turn over decades-worth of documentation about its clandestine procurement; it does not give unfettered access to those scientists who hold the key to the nuclear kingdom; and it does not allow the IAEA to conduct those anytime, anywhere inspections which Western leaders had repeatedly and publicly declared to be essential to a good deal.

The Obama Administration, the British government and the other powers invested in this deal insist that the deal involves such unprecedented monitoring, access and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme that no path to a nuclear weapon remains open. This may be true for the monitoring of Iran’s declared facilities for the period during which they will be under stringent controls. But after little over a decade Iran’s nuclear facilities will be monitored only as much as they were prior to the deal, when Iran cheated the non-proliferation treaty under the noses of the international community. Besides, the agreement’s monitoring mechanisms offer no way of dealing with undeclared facilities. Much of Iran’s covert weaponisation activities took place in facilities that, thanks to the deal’s monitoring mechanisms, the international community will have a hard time inspecting. Even if Western intelligence discovers that elements of a clandestine military programme are still ongoing, a convoluted and contentious process will ensue in which the Ayatollahs have at least a temporary veto power and sensitive intelligence sources might have to be revealed.

Supporters of the deal dismiss alarm at some of the concessions they made because, they claim, the economic leverage of sanctions against the Iranian economy is retained thanks to a “snap-back” mechanism: were the Iranians to cheat, sanctions could be swiftly reinstated.

There are three reasons why this is little more than a soundbite. First, sanctions do not snap back. It took several years to build political support and diplomatic consensus for international sanctions to yield the desired effect. Iran will now have ample time to rebuild its shattered economy and devise antidotes to potential future sanctions. If Iran were to cheat on the deal, they would be able to build a bomb within a year, according to the deal’s supporters themselves. It would take longer for Iran to feel sanctions pain again. Second, a snap-back would trigger an Iranian walk-out. If sanctions are reimposed, Tehran will no longer consider itself bound by the deal. But it is not as if such a turn of events would restore the balance of forces before the deal was signed. Iran’s economy would be vastly improved and provisions allowing Tehran to continue nuclear research and development with Western cooperation would put Iranian scientists in a much better position than today. In eight years’ time, they can even apply for PhDs in the United States. Third, the snap-back mechanism is not straightforward — it requires going through a debate among the six powers, Iran and the European Union about whether there is a violation and whether it warrants reimposing sanctions. Expect pressure from the business community and the diplomats invested in the success of the deal to downplay any but the most egregious violations.

This leaves us the hope, candidly expressed by US and European dignitaries, that the deal can strengthen Iran’s moderates. In reality, the deal removes the arms embargo against Iran in five years and missile programme restrictions in eight. It rehabilitates all Iranian sanctions evaders. It delists all those Iranian entities that engaged in money-laundering over the years to circumvent sanctions. It promises eventually to remove all Revolutionary Guard entities and leaders from EU sanctions. It immediately lifts all restrictions on the Supreme Leader’s business empire. And it cancels all restrictions on business in those areas where the Revolutionary Guards and other hardliners excel. How is this going to benefit the moderates?

It is hard to argue that this is a good deal, unless, of course, one takes Tehran’s side — in which case, this is the best outcome Iran could have hoped for.

The post This Deal Is No Deal appeared first on Standpoint.

No doubt this timely injection into the history of the region will inflame the liberal orthodoxy for whom the sine qua non of Middle Eastern politics has been destructive Western intervention. Karsh offers an important corrective, reminding the reader that local political actors are more than mere pawns; rather, they are skilled and ultimately decisive agents in their own destinies.

Rather than starting with the implementation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the cornerstone of post-colonial accounts of the creation of the modern Middle East, Karsh begins earlier with the disastrous choices made by the Ottoman Empire preceding and during the First World War. In so doing, he accords the Ottomans equal status to the other losing participants of the war who suffered similar imperial dismemberment as the price for martial overreach. This matters because Karsh’s understanding of the grand sweep of history in the region suggests that the postwar foundational mistake was not the breaking apart of Arab nationalism (which he suggests was vastly overstated in a bid for power by the Hashemites) but rather the over-unification of the region.

The book is less an exhaustive history than a series of case studies.  Karsh paints a far richer and more nuanced picture of the creation of the modern Middle East than the shorthand to which we have become accustomed. What emerges is less an imperial imposition than the playing out of a number of different political contests — the machinations of the Hashemites to create Iraq and Transjordan, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Jewish quest for a homeland, the Italian and Greek competition for Anatolia, and resurgent Turkish nationalism.

Karsh continues by illustrating how even at the height of the Cold War, with two superpowers presiding over a supposedly rigid and bipolar world, Middle Eastern states were able to subvert and at times even manipulate the two rival powers. One instance of that manipulation was Anwar Sadat’s expulsion of Soviet personnel from Egypt in the early 1970s and subsequent courting of the West to reverse the limits placed upon the flow of arms to his country. Far stronger examples are the failure of the Soviet Union to prevent Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, the Iranian revolution in 1979, which contributed to the demise of the Carter presidency, and the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan, which many see as the beginning of the end for the USSR.

In one sense there should be nothing surprising about a book like this. Many of the insights that Karsh presents have appeared elsewhere in his own earlier writings and in the work of other scholars such as Fred Halliday, to whom the book is dedicated.

Nonetheless, there is little doubt that as with his previous works Karsh will be further excoriated by his academic critics on the Left. Indeed, the politicisation of the subject matter partly explains why Karsh overstates his case. With the exception of the Iranian revolution, it is dubious to suggest that the tail actually wagged the dog. It is hard to argue that regional states had a determinative effect on great power politics, as the title would suggest.

Equally, Karsh does not place enough emphasis on the effect of external interventions on the region. For instance, Obama’s overhasty retreat and failure to provide the much-needed diplomatic surge was critical to the failure of the nascent Iraqi state and the rise of ISIS.

To an extent Karsh commits the same error as his “New Historian” antagonists such as Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé. They are ultimately engaged in an interpretive war over a similar, limited collection of sources. Going against the trend in diplomatic history, none of them pay enough attention to Arab and Iranian sources and this has left Karsh to make deductions from Western material. As a result, the book is unlikely to settle many historical disputes. It is best seen as a polemical riposte to Obama’s Cairo speech, which was intended to reset America’s relations with the Middle East. Obama suggested that “Muslim majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” Karsh attempts to counter Obama’s limited view of Middle Eastern history, not only by bringing out regional power politics but also the history of Islamist imperial ambitions.

Karsh explains much of the logic behind Obama’s recent nuclear deal with Iran, which can only really be understood as part of Obama’s wider regional ambition for US disengagement. The President’s approach gives Iran a free hand to make unprecedented strategic gains, supposedly bringing order to the region by creating what is actually a dangerous balance of power between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In light of Obama’s folly, it is very hard to doubt the broad sweep of Karsh’s
thesis.

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Under Obama’s stewardship, the post-Cold War international order has started to unravel, bringing anarchy in its wake. When Obama came to office in 2009 it would have been unimaginable that a caliphate could be allowed to thrive in the midst of the Middle East or that a US president would be foolish enough to try to exploit ancient Persian and Arab enmity for the purposes of American retrenchment. Obama’s now familiar refrain is to counsel “strategic patience” while suggesting that America cannot solve every world problem. He remains oblivious to the fact that his worldview is the problem. ISIS has created a vision of the future which Obama appears unable to grasp. Its caliphate is being sustained through the mass murder and repression of those who do not belong.

It is clear that ISIS is neither an outgrowth of al-Qaeda nor the next step in its development. Elements of the media have been peddling the inaccurate characterisation of ISIS as simply a new extremist group whose brutality even al-Qaeda finds excessive. Such a viewpoint explains Obama’s strategy of containment; it suggests that ISIS’s brutality will ultimately cause its demise because it must be at odds with popular sentiment on the ground. Osama bin-Laden prioritised Saudi Arabia and America. In contrast, al-Qaeda in Iraq and now ISIS made the extermination of Shia Muslims a priority. In other words, ISIS is neither a reaction to Western action nor primarily concerned with the West.

ISIS understood from the outset that targeting Shiites and then Kurds would give it significant appeal to Sunni Arabs in Iraq and around the Persian Gulf. Where bin-Laden tried to rally Muslims by attacking America, ISIS has created popular support by killing Shiites, Kurds and Christians. There are more than 20 million Sunnis in Syria and Iraq, a large number of whom are now actively or passively cooperating with ISIS and who would presumably take up arms to resist Kurdish, Shia or American domination. In this light it remains hard to suggest that this is a terrorist organisation, as al-Qaeda was. Nonetheless, last September Obama drew a line of continuity between the two organisations, arguing that ISIS is “a terrorist organisation, pure and simple”. In both a strategic and ideological sense, although ISIS uses terror, it is quite unlike al-Qaeda and it requires a military and political rather than a counter-terror strategy to defeat it.

The fall of Ramadi and Palmyra within a week of each other came as a shock because the month before Iraqi forces had managed to retake Tikrit, and Western leaders believed a tide had been turned in the campaign. Now a third front is opening as Obama’s disastrous Libya intervention has paved the way for ISIS to seize ground there. A predictable pattern of semi-intervention has emerged under Obama, revealing an unwillingness to engage with the messy decisions of foreign policy. The president will not commit US ground forces to secure territory and assist local forces in the maintenance of order. Hence his reliance on limited aerial intervention in Libya, Iraq and Syria. The effect has been to create chaos on the ground and a power vacuum that is being filled by Islamist forces.

This year’s events have revealed that Obama has no will to seriously tackle ISIS. Even as Ramadi fell, the White House continued to insist on the success of its strategy. When questioned on the effectiveness of the campaign its repeated response was to offer a misleading binary choice between full-scale invasion of Iraq or its current limited strategy. Obama appeals to populist anti-war sentiment while his military activity hides the reality that his strategy is designed to contain ISIS until the next president takes over. This was perhaps explicable in political terms before his re-election as president in 2012. However, in his second term it is a cynical dereliction of moral duty and a strategic folly. Apart from an emboldened Iran, his legacy in the Middle East may well be the establishment of a caliphate and a region on the brink of sectarian war. It is fast approaching the point at which a failure by the US to engage seriously with the threat from ISIS cannot be reversed.

The White House’s real military commitment can be measured quite starkly. In the month before Ramadi fell, the US flew 165 air strike sorties. To put this in perspective, the US flew almost that many every day during the Kosovo campaign of the late 1990s. Operation Desert Storm saw 42,600 strike sorties in a little over a month. Even by Obama’s own parameters for engagement he is doing very little. It is hardly surprising that the situation on the ground is deteriorating. Iraqi forces flee their positions because on the ground White House spin can’t obscure the advancing black flags of ISIS.

“Degrade and destroy” were the words that Obama used last September to announce his ISIS strategy. It was a surprise announcement from a president who had made clear the previous day that he had didn’t want to “put the cart before the horse”; in other words that he didn’t have a strategy. The words were meant to sound considered and decisive. The awkward use of “degrade” as a transitive verb should have signalled the lack of a logical endpoint for the strategy. This is really the key to understanding Obama’s position. He cannot express a strategy because he is not working towards a significant political endpoint for either Iraq or Syria.

The grotesque irony is that Obama, by his own measure, will leave Iraq in a worse security situation than when he decided to pull out US troops in 2011. As he said at that time, “We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” He was correct. The military surge had quelled, although not destroyed, the insurgency. In the UK and the US, the Left is quick to blame the 2003 Iraq war for the rise of ISIS, again drawing the logically flawed line of continuity from al-Qaeda in Iraq to ISIS. The rise of ISIS during former President al-Maliki’s divisive time in office was qualitatively different to the al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgency directed at the US. ISIS is fundamentally concerned with the creation of an alternative, theocratic state exploiting Sunni grievances. Today, Iraq is largely divided between Iranian influence and ISIS-controlled territory. This outcome was largely predictable and avoidable. There was no compulsion for the US to quit Iraq completely in 2011. It was Obama’s choice. Whatever chance there was for a state to emerge was stifled. The failure to follow through with a “diplomatic surge” only hastened the descent into political disenfranchisement quickly followed by sectarian violence.

It was not until the early part of this year that Obama revealed the faulty logic that underpinned his “degrade and destroy” strategy for ISIS when he said: “Ultimately these terrorist organisations will be defeated because they don’t have a vision that appeals to people. . . . ISIL can talk about setting up a new caliphate, but nobody is under any illusions that they can actually in a sustained way feed people or educate people or organise a society that would work.”

Obama had used the same linguistic constructions to express a similar faith in popular change, fuelled by social media, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Arab world. This is both a temporal misunderstanding and a misreading of ISIS’s ability to function. How long is “ultimately” and how long can a state govern in an “unsustainable” way? These are questions that Obama cannot answer.

The answer seems to be that his strategy is effectively a version of containment, the US’s Cold War staple. As he sees it, the US only needs limited military involvement to prevent the spread of ISIS because it will eventually implode under the weight of its own brutality. This approach rests upon a dangerous misreading of ISIS. Like most other Western leaders, Obama has failed to understand ISIS as a politically durable entity and also the remarkable resurgence of repressive regimes in the region, even in the wake of the Arab Spring. One only has to remember the bloody suppression of the so-called “Green Revolution” in Iran after the 2009 presidential election to see the limits of popular democratic movements. Equally, Obama’s reluctance to imagine a desirable or achievable endpoint for either Iraq or Syria makes battling ISIS in a coherent way all but impossible. He does not imagine an endpoint because he is desperate to avoid the American imperialist label that bedevilled his predecessor.

It is ironic then that Obama’s folly is to project his worldview and values onto the entire region in a form of undifferentiated cultural naiveté. These were the assumptions which announced his Middle East policy in Cairo and were repeated in Jerusalem in 2013: “Four years ago, I stood in Cairo in front of an audience of young people — politically, religiously, I believe that they must seem a world away. But the things they want, they’re not so different from what the young people here want. They want the ability to make their own decisions and to get an education, get a good job, to worship God in their own way.” This may well be true for large groups of people in the Middle East (as the Arab Spring initially suggested) but not everyone has embraced Western values. Obama has confused modernisation with Westernisation because he cannot fundamentally appreciate a worldview that doesn’t ultimately end in democracy. Yet this is the one thing shared by the regimes in Tehran, Damascus and ISIS.

Obama’s fantasy about Iran becoming a thriving democracy, sharing political responsibility in the region, and his insistence that ISIS is not about Islam are not only naive but dangerous. There is no reason to assume that Iran’s return to the international fold and ensuing economic growth will lead to it becoming a democracy. There is every reason to assume that a more economically powerful Iran will pursue a nationalist agenda. Indeed, the evidence that many Iranians support a more secular state does not counter a theocracy specifically designed to resist reform. In other words, political change would probably require another popular revolution and Obama’s recent diplomacy makes that less, rather than more, likely.

Equally, ISIS has drawn considerable strength from the two interrelated acts that Obama sees as its greatest weakness. The mixture of extreme violence and the holding of territory have represented a wildly effective reengineering of both the narrative and strategy of Islamism. This is a significant contrast with al-Qaeda. Although seemingly reliant on existing jihadist tropes, ISIS’s propaganda machine inverts al-Qaeda’s narrative of Western subjugation of Islam and the caliphate as a distant, future objective. Instead, it stakes everything on current victory, the holding of territory and the declaration of a caliphate now. In that sense, Obama’s strategy of containment would actually represent a considerable victory for ISIS — de facto recognition of its territorial integrity.

ISIS’s strategy and the geographic path of its military campaign is neither random nor opportunistic. Its military strategy cannot be understood without an appreciation of its specific reworking of Islamic eschatology to exploit sectarianism. In a clever mix of political disenfranchisement and religious belief, ISIS transformed the democratic failings of Maliki and Assad’s iron rule into sectarian warfare. ISIS exploits early sectarian Islamic apocalyptic prophecies from previous conflicts in Iraq and the Levant. These resonate in today’s sectarian civil wars. As a result, ISIS has set out to reinforce its political strength by seizing religiously significant targets such as Dabiq, near Syria’s border with Turkey. For ISIS this will be the site of its supremacy over “Rome” (a synonym for the West) before going on to conquer Constantinople. Equally, Kobane’s importance to ISIS is a reflection of eschatological writing.

The fall of Ramadi and Palmyra should leave no doubts about ISIS’s military capability and its ability to operate on multiple fronts. It should be abundantly clear that America’s military strategy for dealing with ISIS has failed.

However, there are possible strategies for dealing with ISIS but they would require the US to increase its presence on the ground. Both strands of Obama’s current strategy should be abandoned. “Degrade” is too vague and “destroy” is too ambitious. The West’s strategy should be to defeat ISIS in much the same way that al-Qaeda in Iraq was defeated by 2011. In practical terms, this would mean that ISIS lost the ability to hold and administer territory and was, at worst, a small terrorist organisation with limited reach.

The point of a deeper understanding of ISIS is to acknowledge that it is possible to engage it with conventional military force. Because its military objectives are governed by religious and territorial imperatives its likely military response is more predictable than al-Qaeda’s insurgency ever was. Without territorial integrity ISIS loses its self-proclaimed basis for legitimacy and would be forced to fight to maintain it.

Disaggregation of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq should be the first step in such a strategy. For those who remember US military neologisms, “Af-Pak” was the last unsuccessful attempt to unify a theatre of operations around an existential threat. In this sense Obama’s implicit “Iraq first” approach is correct. First, it delegitimises ISIS’s internal logic. Second, it recognises that although the threat from ISIS is unified the situations in Iraq and Syria are each unique and require very different strategies. Containment of ISIS’s land grabs in Iraq and Syria makes no sense. Containment and parallel attempts to broker peace in what is effectively a civil war in Syria make much more sense. Currently, the Assad regime views the Western powers, rather than ISIS, as its primary antagonist. This means the US bombing campaign there is supporting an incoherent political strategy. A concentration of US power against ISIS in Iraq might force Assad and his Iranian backers to change their calculus and start fighting ISIS with a fervour currently reserved for other opposition forces.

Obama’s now infamous policy of “leading from behind” has seen him foolishly resuscitate elements of another Cold War strategy: the Nixon doctrine. Nixon’s innovation was to get Vietnam to take over its war from the US. It was a strategy replicated in the Middle East through pre-revolutionary Iran. Last December, Obama made clear that he wished to see Iran become a “very successful regional power”. The difference being that post-revolutionary Iran remains a theocracy, vocally opposed to America and her allies and decisively able to stamp out popular dissent. Yet again, Obama seems to believe appeasement will inevitably, inexplicably, lead to democracy in Tehran.

As America washes its hands of responsibility in the Middle East it has effectively resuscitated Tehran’s dreams of regional power. Indeed, one of the primary complicating factors in Syria and Iraq has been that US reluctance to use its own troops on the ground has led to a reliance on Iranian forces and Iran-backed Shia militias. This common thread draws the two conflicts further together and has enabled Iran to extend its hegemony over Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut and Sanaa. US reluctance to act in Syria is largely out of concern that Shia militias in Iraq might retaliate. America urgently needs to reduce its reliance on Iranian forces. Obama’s personal mission to conclude nuclear negotiations with Tehran only reinforces the extent to which Tehran can limit American action. The humanitarian consequences of Iranian support are clear in Tikrit. Shia militias are preventing the return of displaced residents while systematically destroying the city. It is incomprehensible why America is pursuing the same strategy for retaking Ramadi, simply transferring territory from ISIS to Iranian control

America faces the dilemma in Syria either of pursuing the politically unthinkable U-turn of supporting Assad or arming rebels who may or may not prove to be moderate or militarily decisive. ISIS’s current success might have opened a slim window of possibility. Both Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran share an interest in defeating ISIS before it reaches their own borders. Their mutual balance of weakness would not enable a formal deal between them but might allow a ceasefire among their Syrian proxies in order to focus efforts on ISIS. A government of national unity might be brokered that balanced power between Sunni and Shia. Assad’s regime looks increasingly fragile. His Iranian and Russian sponsors are negotiating his exile with the West, in order to bolster their own strategic positions. Despite his apparent war crimes, Assad’s personal fate matters less than the stability of Syria.

The primary focus of the US should be on Iraq, regardless of whether a ceasefire is achievable in Syria or Iran is forced to deal with ISIS in Syria unilaterally. The only way to defeat ISIS is with a ground force that will clear and then secure and rebuild currently occupied territory. Clearing ISIS from areas it holds is necessary but insufficient to prevent their return. The areas have to be rebuilt, repopulated and secured. ISIS’s operations in Iraq and Syria can be divided by a physical force that enters at Kobane. From here it would make sense to exploit ISIS’s weakest physical links between Raqqa and northern Aleppo along the upper Euphrates. Not only will this physically destroy claims to a caliphate but a divided ISIS force will be easier to defeat operationally. Equally the US has to increase the tempo of its air operations. The current level is too limited to have a meaningful effect on a disciplined military force. Furthermore, a recent special forces conference in the US identified the areas of military deficiency in Iraq: a dearth of drones, a lack of intelligence on the enemy’s networks and counter-IED technologies, and no clear narrative to push back against the group’s messaging.

The most immediate way to deal with this is for Obama to lift the prohibition on American boots on the ground and start providing proper assistance to the Iraqis. Iraqi troops would benefit from combat advisers in the form of special forces, and forward air controllers would improve the accuracy of airstrikes. The US Joint Special Operations Command was remarkably efficient between 2003 and 2010 both in gathering and acting on intelligence. It was a significant factor in the successful campaign against al-Qaeda. There is every reason to believe it could achieve the same against high-level ISIS leadership even if it was simply providing the intelligence-gathering and analysis for Iraqi special forces to act upon.

Current estimates of effective force sizes range from 10,000 (according to former head of Central Command General Anthony Zinni) to 25,000 (according to military analyst Fred Kagan). These are relatively modest numbers, compared to the peak of 176,000 coalition forces during the second Iraq War. However, the US is not a suitable unilateral force both because of domestic opposition and also due to the need for regional political legitimacy, which America does not carry by itself. A multinational force would need to consist of the US in partnership with Arab and Western states.

Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that Iraq’s principal problem is political and that a military solution cannot be sensibly pursued without support in nation-building. The endpoint has to be a state that has enough stability to function and can satisfy differing sectarian interests.

There is no reason why the recent ISIS victories have to signal further regional disintegration. Regardless of whether Obama agrees with his predecessor’s Middle East policies, he does have a duty to make sure he does not materially contribute to the further destabilisation of Iraq, Syria and the greater Middle East. America’s action or inaction is still materially significant.

ISIS long ago crossed over from being a symptom of existing problems in the Middle East to being a catalyst for new conflicts. It has considerably weakened the notion that statehood yields security, a condition traditionally reinforced by the international system. Indeed, its aim is to permanently destroy political boundaries. Part of the problem is that by using local proxies Obama has set in motion nationalist rivalries that will actually serve to break the region apart. The defeat of ISIS on the ground by a committed international or US force is relatively straightforward militarily. The harder reality to grasp is that Iraq’s stability and the continued suppression of ISIS cannot be entrusted to regional power players. Iraq and Syria’s future will require a peacekeeping force for a considerable period of time, perhaps led by the UN but ultimately backed by US military power.

The price of inaction should be obvious. ISIS is clear in its desire to start a sectarian war which would probably metastasise throughout the region. So far it is proving surprisingly adept at creating the preconditions. It has successfully established itself as a physical and symbolic rallying point for global jihad. Its online reach has been extraordinary and while the threat of terrorist export is probably limited in numerical terms, the export of an idea has a pernicious effect. The West has a vital interest in preventing its citizens going out to fight and then bringing ISIS’s destructive ideology back with them.

The post How To Rescue Iraq From Obama’s Folly appeared first on Standpoint.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, and the inability to conclude negotiations with Greece over debt repayment, should have ended those assumptions and forced Western leaders to reconsider their political model, not least in their own backyard. Russia’s exit from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe shows that Ukraine is not simply an isolated event. President Putin no longer feels any obligation to honour the long- standing security guarantees of Europe. In the absence of coherent Nato and EU leadership Russia is left to negotiate with the “Normandy Group” of Germany, France and Ukraine.

Their response to the crisis should have also made plain another uncomfortable truth. Under President Obama, America has become more isolationist than at any point since 1941. The crisis in Ukraine has revealed deep fault lines between the European allies and also with America. Years of reliance on the US backstop have meant that Europe long ago stopped spending sufficiently to maintain its armed forces. In 2014 only four Nato members met the agreed target of devoting 2 per cent of GDP to defence and one of them, the US, distorts the true state of Nato capability. Nato has always ultimately been reliant on overwhelming American military power. However, Obama’s quixotic approach to foreign policy makes his continued assurances about European security ring hollow. If Putin were to further test Nato resolve by threatening the Baltic states, it is not clear whether Washington, or any other Nato members, would fulfill their treaty obligations of mutual defence. 

The situation is no better in the UK. Once the euphoria of victory has receded, David Cameron will be faced by an unenviable list of tasks that will seal Britain’s international position. The preservation of the Union and the future of that United Kingdom in Europe are interlinked and will dominate the new parliament. Cameron’s herculean challenge will be to simultaneously convince the Scots, the Europeans and indeed his own Eurosceptic backbenchers that a new form of British exceptionalism in Europe is a meaningful way forward for all of them. Cameron’s negotiations with Europe have the potential to instigate useful reform of the fragile continental settlement. However, if they fail they also have the capacity to mimic the self-interested nationalism unleashed in the UK and Greece, hurting cohesion and Europe’s ability to defend itself. The election campaign was notable for the main parties’ lack of vision and their failure to commit to 2 per cent of GDP spending on defence. Britain’s continued global influence is being maintained on a tightrope.

Where does this leave the West? In The Edge (Little, Brown, £12.99) Mark Urban, Newsnight’s diplomatic and defence editor, grapples with this question. It is a slim but devastating assessment of what he suggests is the twilight of Western military power.

Urban is hardly the first to tackle the question of Western decline. Starting with Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and picking up momentum in the 19th and 20th centuries, there have been several waves of declinist prophesy. The spectrum of declinism has encapsulated ideological aversion to the perceived ills of the Occident and those, such as Oswald Spengler, who sounded a more tragic lament for Western culture. The most recent strain has been concerned with the decline of American power. Most influentially, Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, predicted the economic overstretch of the US only two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It would be glib to mock declinist arguments for poor timing but the genre certainly has its problems. Political scientists have a poor record of predicting future events — the end of the Cold War, or indeed last month’s election, being prime examples. Spengler and Kennedy could both be read more sympathetically as diagnosing a form of slow decay in great powers. Nonetheless, the issue with most declinist tracts is that they tend to have a teleological arrogance and it is rarely clear what point declinism serves. It is often more useful to think about foreign policy in terms of present-day outcomes and obligations, without the excuses of seemingly inevitable historical forces.

Urban’s argument is all the more powerful for managing to avoid many, if not all, these traps in his concise wake-up call for Western politicians. Rather than trying to diagnose a vague, existential sense of decline, he illustrates the decline of Western military strength since the end of the Cold War, as Western powers sought to reap the “peace dividend”. The scale of cuts is extraordinary and the trend has only accelerated since the financial crisis, despite increased global instability. Since then, cuts to military spending across Europe have been in the order of 20 to 25 per cent.

Almost as worrying is the faulty logic behind the allocation of these limited resources across the Continent. So confident were Europe’s leaders that war between states belonged to a troubled past, and that European countries would never face war alone, that most countries now lack full-spectrum military capabilities. So some Nato members might have anti-aircraft capability, others submarines. This may have made sense at the height of Nato cohesion during the Cold War but thinly-spread capabilities are a terrifying prospect in the light of Europe’s current fragility. This is worth remembering for countries such as the UK which still cling to the notion of Great Power status, without a serious commitment to support it.

Trident is one of the more shocking examples of this. A largely synthetic parliamentary debate focused on whether to renew the deterrent with three or four submarines for a continuous at-sea presence. This obscures the operational reality that for a nuclear-armed submarine to pose a credible threat, it must avoid being tracked by adversarial hunter-killer submarines. To maintain that ability requires maritime surveillance aircraft and an undersea listening capabiltiy. Britain lost the Nimrod surveillance aircraft to defence cuts. This wouldn’t have been a problem in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, but Russia poses a new threat and is operating submarines close to Britain’s shore. The Royal Navy won’t comment on the frequency of Russian incursions but had to call in US surveillance aircraft earlier in the year. The nuclear submarine HMS Talent recently had its turret “damaged by floating ice”, a Cold War euphemism for a collision with a Russian warship.

America and her allies have long pursued an “Offset” strategy through technological superiority of equipment, the logic being that a numerical disadvantage in conventional forces could be made up for with increased firepower. It worked to reduce defence costs under Eisenhower’s “New Look” and was repeated under Reagan, economically pummelling the Soviet Union.

Urban does an excellent job of ripping the logic of the current “Third Offset” strategy to pieces. The experience of war suggests that there is little match for numerical superiority of a potential enemy. America and Britain’s disastrous F-35 jet is an excellent example of why the Offset strategy has led to a decline in defence capability, despite huge increases in defence spending. In simple terms, vast amounts of money were invested in a small number of extremely expensive aircraft. To date none are in service.

Urban has written a comprehensive account of the cost of replacing modern weapon systems, the terrifyingly low actual numbers of technologically advanced equipment in service at any time, and the deficiencies this creates. The strategic consequences of the concentration of defence spending in a small number of expensive pieces of equipment are profound. If Russia were to step up its belligerence and invade a Nato member, then the alliance’s conventional forces would not only be slow to respond but would also be too weak. Nato leaders would then face the unenviable decision between opting for a nuclear counterattack or allowing Russia to destroy the alliance through inaction.

Urban’s argument is weaker when trying to twin its convincing analysis of Western decline with the rise of other geopolitical rivals in a multi-polar world. Some of his examples, such as Brazil, are not compelling as strategic challengers. However, his analysis of the potential for conflict with China or Russia is interesting. Despite its increases in military spending, Russia may not outrun the combination of Western sanctions and extremely cheap oil and gas. Similarly, China, despite double-digit defence spending, faces serious challenges — not least slowing economic growth, a demographic timebomb and the challenges of maintaining political stability without democracy.

Urban is correct to suggest that so far there has been no meaningful reassessment of national priorities in the West, even at the last Nato summit. He remains sceptical, although not entirely dismissive, of the possibility of reversing the West’s military decline and the will to act internationally.

It is, of course, often hard to distinguish between decline and retreat, particularly in periods of extreme turbulence in the international system. But this difference in interpretation is crucial for leaders, who must create grand strategy based on a realistic allocation of their national resources to the pursuit of vital interests. Obama seems to have been convinced of the inevitability of US decline since entering office. The real question is whether his retreat to isolationism has turned his declinist outlook into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Obama is disengaged from America’s traditional role as a force for international stability, while simultaneously pursuing projects with unsound strategic logic, such as the disastrous nuclear negotiations with Iran. For most of his presidency Obama’s primary focus hasn’t been foreign policy at all, but “nation-building at home”. The result, euphemistically called “leading from behind”, is not a strategy but rather a chaotic mixture of aerial interventions, intended to avoid deploying US troops. For those who remember the eerily similar foreign misadventures of the Clinton presidency, the recent disasters in Libya, Iraq and Syria are unsurprising. The disjointed consequences of this approach are abundantly clear. In May, even as US special forces killed an ISIS commander in Syria, there were no conventional US forces to help prevent the fall of Ramadi in Iraq.

It is no longer possible to apply logical prediction to where and how the US will engage in international crises because the President has no sense of what America’s vital interests are and no commitment to sustained deployment of US forces. The European members of Nato should have realised that Europe is now simply seen as another theatre of operation for an overstretched US military and certainly not the most important one.

Urban doesn’t devote enough space to the problem of political will both in today’s leaders and the public. David Cameron stoked the ire of his backbenches and senior military commanders by refusing to commit to the UK’s Nato spending target during the election. Despite this, defence remains in the background on both sides of the Atlantic for the time being.

A second new book, Superpower (Penguin, £14.99), by the fêted foreign American foreign policy commentator Ian Bremmer, serves as a different kind of wake-up call. Bremmer has long suggested that US power is in long-term decline towards a “G0” world. The implication is that the G7 (or G8) is discarded and that the G20 is too big for decision making. This so-called “rise of the rest” thesis is a staple of TED talk primers on globalisation, and Bremmer himself has promoted this idea elsewhere. 

Washington-led globalisation has, according to this argument, sown the seeds of multiple challenges to American hegemony. None of this would have been particularly surprising to America’s early Cold War warriors. The implicit bargain was that America would protect free trade and stability to allow economic growth in return for America’s hegemony and definition of global rules.

This book is clearly intended as an early intervention in the 2016 presidential race and expands Bremmer’s argument into the territory of neo-isolationism. Worryingly, Bremmer’s voice carries weight with “Davos man” and his book is a concerted attempt to rehabilitate the idea of isolationism for a global elite of policymakers. He fuses the strains of isolationist thought from both sides of the party divide. The suggestion is both that America causes more problems than it solves abroad and that it can only remain in a position of economic strength by turning its focus inwards.

This is a surprising argument because Bremmer clearly believes in America’s continued superpower status for the foreseeable future. Equally, while sketching foreign policy decline, he makes a strong case for America’s domestic economic strength. As he notes, demographics are on the side of America in the global economic race. America is still a global leader in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation and is starting to surge in domestic energy production.

In fact Bremmer’s analysis is not really of American decline but rather the suggestion that the US should take an inward turn. Bremmer posits three scenarios for the future of American power: “Moneyball America”, a shorthand for “realist” policy where America takes selected risks overseas to safeguard national security and prosperity; “Indispensable America”, which suggests that American prosperity is dependent on her continued ability to shape the world order; and lastly Bremmer’s favoured option, “Independent America”. Such a vision is a departure from America’s role as global force and an inward turn to focus on building a “more perfect union” at home. The only real vestige of international engagement that would remain in such a scenario is trade.

The problem is that the arguments presented are made of straw. American foreign policy has always been a combination of the different strains that Bremmer outlines. This is not a vision of decline but rather of retreat as a conscious political choice. In some senses the book is less of a policy prescription than a description of Obama’s foreign policy. Parts of the book sound like memos from Obama’s State Department:

We can’t renounce important international commitments overnight. Our allies need time to transition to a world in which they must assume greater responsibility for their own security . . . Germany and Japan are wealthy countries that can take responsibility for their own security . . . It will be easier for them to shake their citizens out of their complacency if America makes clear it will do less in years to come.

There is a real danger that retreat rather than decline will take hold on both sides of the Atlantic. Bremmer’s interjection into policy debate has not appeared from nowhere. The presidential playing field is far from clear at the moment. Nonetheless, many global conservatives fear that Rand Paul’s candidacy might push the Republican party towards isolationism. This obscures the more worrying rise of isolationist thought on the Left. Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement video is striking for the relative silence on what should have been her greatest achievements as Secretary of State. The comparison with her last election campaign is stark and shows the direction of movement in centre-left American politics. In the last campaign Clinton used her now infamous “3am phone call” television advertisement to question Obama’s competence as a leader in a dangerous world.

Two things have changed since then. Under Obama, progressive opposition to intervention, short of invasion, has disappeared. Intervention in the form of aerial bombardment or extrajudicial drone warfare is the new norm, regardless of its efficacy. In tandem, the quest for ever elusive domestic social justice has eclipsed all overt global concerns. As some commentators have observed, the Clinton brand is being subtly refashioned as a byword for America insulating itself from overt intervention. In that world intervention is reduced to covert technocratic warfare which is neither protracted in length nor debated. It is still too early to judge how the presidential candidates will form their foreign policy positions. But Clinton will undoubtedly have the most experience and it is worrying that she appears to be backpedalling on the US’s historic global role.

The most important point that both Bremmer and Urban make, albeit indirectly, is that the US remains indispensible to maintain the relatively liberal world order we currently enjoy. Last month’s VE day celebrations should have been a salutary reminder that 70 years of peace was kept by Pax Americana. The best reminder of the consequences of hasty American withdrawal is in the Middle East: the disintegration of Iraq, Syria and Libya and the rise of the ISIS insurgency were not inevitable, despite the protestations of the Left, who treat the 2003 Iraq war as a skeleton key to all future misadventures.

Similar arguments can be made about Western Europe which currently faces a sustained assault on its values and borders both from within and from Russia. Part of the problem is that the West is no longer sure what values are being defended or indeed if these values have universal applicability. Perhaps there is a simpler explanation of what is at stake in the West that we should bear in mind when considering the future direction of foreign policy and defence spending. Values certainly do matter but can be encapsulated more simply. For the migrants risking their lives in the Mediterranean to reach Europe, the West is a place where ordinary people have the freedom and means to lead lives of prosperous self-direction. Obama, and to some extent Cameron, seem to have lost sight of this. Nato and the EU are important not just as a collection of states or geographic entity but as a constellation of shared values — the values for which so many laid down their lives 70 years ago and for which so many are prepared to risk their lives in order to secure today.

The post Why The World Still Needs The West appeared first on Standpoint.

The day after President Barack Obama withdrew his threat to veto legislation that gives Congress a say over a looming Iran nuclear deal, the Daily Beast ran the headline “Obama Blinks on Iran Nuke Vote.” The Iran deal may turn out to be the signature foreign policy legacy of his presidency. Why then, given the importance the president attaches to the deal, did he give up his fight with Congress?

The answer is that the president cannot hold his ground against more determined adversaries. His presidency is a litany of red lines and principled policies announced and then scrapped when the going got tough. Nowhere is this more evident than in foreign policy, especially Iran.

Since the president opened a secret back channel with Iran in Oman in 2013, he has been reluctant to apply pressure to its government, lest  they should walk away from the negotiations.

Recall the “Assad must step aside” public demand Obama made in August 2011. By the look of it, Assad will still be in office on January 20, 2017, to watch the inauguration of Obama’s presidential successor from afar. Recall also that the president made Assad’s use of chemical weapons a red line that would invite military strikes. Assad used chemical weapons and continues to use chlorine bombs to terrorise and murder civilians.

Obama did not exact the price he promised Assad would pay. Bombing Assad would have upset Tehran. Obama blinked. Critics of the nuclear deal which is shaping up as negotiations race towards the June 30 deadline will note that the president has done the same on virtually every red line the United States and its allies announced over the years with regard to Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Since the beginning of the nuclear standoff with Iran, the official position of the international community was expressed in six UN Chapter VII Security Council resolutions demanding the complete suspension of any nuclear enrichment activity as a precondition for testing the real nature of Iran’s nuclear programme. The US was particularly invested in this aspect; Iran’s demand for a right to enrich ran contrary to a long-held US interpretation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), according to which NPT members were only entitled to peaceful nuclear energy, not necessarily enrichment — a key component to bomb-making but not essential to nuclear energy production. Most countries with nuclear power plants, including Iran, generate electricity from nuclear fuel supplied by a handful of producers.

Iran has resisted demands to suspend enrichment and dismantle its enrichment facilities. The emerging nuclear deal will now concede Iran a right to enrich uranium. Such recognition — which Iran implicitly extracted already in the interim deal of November 2013 — mortally weakens the previously held US position. Any member of the NPT wishing to develop its own indigenous enrichment programme need only mention the Iran nuclear deal to fend off any future objections. The president who bet his presidency on standing firm against nuclear proliferation has just undermined a decades-old US policy against proliferation. Another blink.

Much like the right to enrich, preserving an industrial-sized nuclear programme has always been Iran’s red line. By contrast, the Obama administration has repeatedly committed itself to the dismantlement of Iran’s key facilities of Fordow, an underground uranium enrichment installation, and Arak, a heavy water reactor suitable for plutonium production.

Obama exposed the Fordow facility in September 2009. In his own words, “the size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful programme”. When critics questioned his ability to stand his ground, after important initial concessions were made in the November 2013 interim deal, the president snapped back. At a policy conference in Washington DC, in December 2013, Obama said: “Now, in terms of specifics, we know that they don’t need to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordow in order to have a peaceful nuclear programme. They certainly don’t need a heavy-water reactor at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear programme. They don’t need some of the advanced centrifuges that they currently possess in order to have a limited, peaceful nuclear programme.”

Iran would have none of that, however, and Obama blinked again. The announced deal merely seeks a temporary reconfiguration and downsizing of the two facilities. Once the deal restrictions expire in a decade, Iran will be able to revamp the two facilities as it pleases.

Verification was also critical for the Obama administration, especially in line with the president’s signature policy of nuclear disarmament and arms control. Given Iran’s history of nuclear lies and subterfuge, a lengthy and intrusive enforcement and verification mechanism was in order. But Iran has stonewalled again and Obama, so keen for an agreement, appears to have blinked. The announced deal merely stipulates that Iran will provisionally implement a verification regime its government already ratified 11 years ago. It will be up to Iran to maintain that commitment. And given that Iran had provisionally done the same under the 2004 Paris agreements, only to abruptly suspend such stricter monitoring arrangements when it chose to begin uranium enrichment, none of this is very promising.

That is especially true when one looks at the so-called Possible Military Dimensions of Iran’s programme. The US insist they have overwhelming evidence that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons until recently. A deal that restores the confidence of the international community in the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear activities needs first to address all Iran’s past suspicious activities. Yet Iran is no longer expected to show accountability until well past the agreement. Knowing what Iran did in the past is critical in order to verify its future compliance with the NPT. The Obama administration has instead agreed that a vague commitment to answer questions in the future will suffice. One more blink.

None of this is surprising. In the first major foreign policy speech of his presidency, Obama addressed the topic of nuclear disarmament before  a vast crowd of Czech citizens in Prague on April 5, 2009. Referring to Iran’s combined threat of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, Obama said: “Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran’s neighbors and our allies. The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defence against these missiles. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defence system that is cost-effective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defence construction in Europe will be removed.”

Six months later, Obama scrapped the missile defence commitment to the Czech Republic and Poland. And when, five years later, Iran refused to discuss its missile programme, he agreed to let it fall by the wayside of the negotiations. If you like your missiles, you can keep your missiles. Obama blinked, blinked, and blinked again. Why is anyone surprised that he continues to do so?

The post The President Blinked — The Ayatollah Didn’t appeared first on Standpoint.

The Obama administration probably hoped that a dramatic change of course in America’s Middle East foreign policy, coupled with a milestone nuclear agreement that leaves Iran’s nuclear infrastructure intact, could occur without a robust public debate. The administration kept crucial elements of the negotiations to itself for as long as it could. It failed to inform Israel and Gulf Arab allies about a back-channel with Iran it conducted in Oman until September 2013, when it was too late to reverse the basic contours of the interim nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA).

It kept the full text of the implementation agreement of the JPOA out of the public eye and limited the ability of Congress to review and read the document in unprecedented ways. It failed to explain why important elements of what a “good deal” would look like were allowed to fall by the wayside—Iran’s ballistic missile programme and the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme, to name the most glaring omissions—preferring instead to denounce critics as “warmongers”.

The White House also muddied the waters on the impact that a prolonged period of sanctions relief and sanctions suspension would do to Iran’s economy—and similarly dismissed those who came up with different figures from its own, even as evidence piled up about its gross underestimation of Iran’s economic windfall from the JPOA.

In short, despite grumblings and legislative threats from Congress and an increasingly apprehensive set of regional allies fearful of Iran’s rising power, President Obama believed that he could present a nuclear deal as a fait accompli, even as the agreement taking shape appears to undermine the US’s previously proclaimed strategic goals of preventing Iran from ever achieving nuclear weapons capability.

Whether Netanyahu’s speech was poorly timed, impolite or impolitic, it threw a wrench into what until then had appeared to be an unchallenged diplomatic process conducted behind the scenes. The prime minister asked probing questions on the direction of negotiations and the substance of Western concessions, the nature of the deal and its future implications. That is why Obama reacted so furiously—the much-touted breach of protocol obscured the fact that the President was being challenged on the substance of his policies and did not have a good answer to offer. He should have. Netanyahu’s words were not shrill, partisan accusations. The White House could have used the speech as a pretext to retreat from unwise concessions it already made. It could have stated forcefully its position in public. Instead, the administration chose to turn differences over a matter of vital strategic significance into a debate about etiquette.

The tactic failed, largely because by making the matter such a big deal the White House turned Netanyahu’s speech into an event of global interest and significance and his questions, to date left unanswered, resonated with reasonable people and traditional supporters of the President.

Having failed to fend off a debate over substantive policy issues, the White House found another pretext to change subject when, a few days after Netanyahu addressed Congress, Senator Tom Cotton, a freshman Senator from Arkansas, spearheaded an open letter to Iran’s leaders, which was co-signed by 46 other Republican Senators. The letter warned Iran’s leaders of negative repercussions of a deal negotiated while keeping Congress out of the loop.

Once again, the White House could have addressed substantive policy issues raised by increasingly frustrated legislators. Instead, it chose to denounce the move, rehashing the script it used against Netanyahu. Complaining about lèse-majesté may have its merits. But so did the letter.

It is politically foolish to antagonise Congress and not just because its concerns about the deal are well-justified. If the President holds any hope of implementing any deal, it will need to work with Congress to phase out and ultimately undo the elaborate sanctions architecture legislated over the years.

As with Netanyahu, though, Obama thinks time is on his side. After all, Netanyahu’s electoral gamble was not going well for the Israeli prime minister, with his party trailing behind its opponents in the polls as he came to Washington. What better way to skirt Netanyahu’s cri de coeur than to accuse him of brazen and cynical electioneering?

The President should have known better though. A left-of-centre Israeli government would no doubt have sought to mend fences. It would have been be more conciliatory on the Palestinian-Israeli track. But on Iran, it is hard to imagine anything different in strategic terms. As it turned out, Netanyahu won a fourth term of office. The gulf between Israel and the Obama administration over Iran will continue.

The same holds true for Obama’s domestic arena. Discounting Republicans today may make any diplomatic breakthrough short-lived. After all, the President himself threw into the dustbin of history the agreement that former President George W. Bush had reached with Israel’s late prime minister Ariel Sharon, over the territorial contours of a future Palestinian state.

Obama did not agree with the terms of that document and, because the deal had no Congressional authorisation, Obama did not feel bound by it. It was his predecessor’s policy, and he was entitled to discard it. His successors may feel the same about an Iran deal that contradicts not just the policy of all previous US administrations, but also Congressional legislation the President may have the power to suspend but not to reverse.

Obama may still get his way on the Iran deal. But his choice to ignore allies and neglect Congress will only work if the deal he signs off is as good as his critics demand it to be. Otherwise, the President’s “my way or the highway” approach to Iran’s nuclear programme will backfire.

The post Fait Pas Accompli appeared first on Standpoint.

Democracy is not the same thing as “people power”. A nation that demands to be welcomed into the democratic fold must expect to satisfy certain conditions besides simply holding elections. Before the West commits itself to support any new Egyptian regime, it should insist as a bare minimum on the following: Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims to be protected from persecution and propaganda; women to enjoy full legal equality in all spheres of public and private life; unqualified recognition of and permanent peace with Israel.

Neoconservatism is not reactionary. The late Irving Kristol wrote: “I had no patience with the old conservatism that confronted the tides of history by shouting ‘Stop!'” As George W. Bush might have said, David Cameron misunderestimated neoconservatism when he caricatured it thus: “We should accept that we cannot impose democracy at the barrel of a gun; that we cannot drop democracy from 10,000 feet and we shouldn’t try. Put crudely, that was what was wrong with the ‘neocon’ approach and why I am a liberal Conservative, not a neoconservative.” No neocon ever thought like that, much less acted as if they did. But neither do they shy away from what Kristol called “manliness” in foreign policy, as Europe — enfeebled by its safety-first social democratic mentality — invariably does. Before he snipes at neocons again, Mr Cameron should read The Neoconservative Persuasion, a new posthumous collection of Irving Kristol’s essays from 1942 to 2009, edited by his widow Gertrude Himmelfarb.

The principles that have enabled this “neocon persuasion” to reinvigorate American conservatism are at least as much concerned with domestic as with foreign policy, firmly opposed to the illiberal consequences of a false egalitarianism that denied the spirit of enterprise. Our “Liberal-Conservative” coalition would do well to reconsider the deeply illiberal effects of the policy with which it is now threatening our great universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge. The withdrawal of state funding for the humanities could be justified, and in the long run should even be beneficial, provided that these universities are allowed to charge tuition fees at a market rate. But the government has now decreed that they may only charge up to a maximum of £9,000, and even this inadequate figure is dependent on a discriminatory admissions policy that would give parental poverty more weight than academic achievement, reward bad schools at the expense of good ones, and elevate social engineering above national greatness.

We may still hope that the ancient universities will resist this use of arbitrary state power. Macaulay, in his History of England, recalled the struggle between James II and Magdalen College, Oxford: “The nature of the academical system of England is such that no event which seriously affects the interests and honour of either university [Oxford or Cambridge] can fail to excite a strong feeling throughout the country.” But he who pays the piper calls the tune. Andrew Hamilton, the present vice-chancellor of Oxford, is paid £382,000, plus a £3.5 million house. I doubt that he and others like him will wish to put all this at risk by defying the government, if necessary to the point where, like the fellows of Magdalen, he is forced out of office. 

Rather than bully our best universities the government should listen to admissions tutors, who say that many of their successful state school applicants have ignored teachers who told them they stood no chance against privately educated students. State schools that encourage their best pupils to apply should be rewarded financially, while those that discourage them should be penalised. There are plenty of good role models. Last year Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School, an inner-city London comprehensive, got twelve pupils into Oxbridge. If the Vaughan, which is also under threat from its own Diocesan education authority, is allowed to continue to achieve such excellence, there is no reason why other schools should not emulate it.

The post We are all Neocons Now appeared first on Standpoint.

There is much to suggest that Middle East capitals will read Obama this way — but they will do so at their peril. First, the president has the power to do what he likes to pursue foreign policy. He does not need Congress to deliver peace in the Middle East though he does need it to launch a major war (yet he can do without it if he has to respond to provocation). The new Congress will not deny him support for a tough course of action.

The stalemate in the Middle East peace process is largely the by-product of Obama’s misreading of the regional map, a misreading made stronger by the impression that his vast home majority gave him the authority to bully Israel. He may now find it harder to pressure Binyamin Netanyahu on settlements. The new Congress will be less sympathetic to Obama’s lenience towards Palestinian recalcitrance. 

The Israeli PM knows that Obama’s political future hangs in the balance. Anyway, the conditions to jump-start the process are simply non-existent. Still, no Israeli leader would wish to lose an American president at a time when Israel might need Washington most to confront Iran. Besides, the president might, after all, still be re-elected in two years’ time. There is some wiggle room there for Obama, but not much, especially because his prestige and his chances for a second term cannot afford another failure. Expect little, therefore, on this front.

Meanwhile, the US is fighting a proxy war with Iran in Iraq. America’s enemies cannot have been overly impressed from the start with the president’s warrior qualities. He could choose to pre-empt Iraq’s likely descent into chaos after the US departure by pursuing a tougher course, delaying troop withdrawal and seeking open confrontation with Iran. But that would require a policy U-turn that would alienate his base and not necessarily yield the kind of spectacular results needed to turn the choice between failure and stalemate into one between progress and triumph.

Afghanistan is the one area where the president has shown an inclination to taste more blood than even his predecessor. Yet Afghanistan, the war Obama chose to fight and the terrain where he is prepared to unleash even more lethal force without much concern for his liberal credentials, is the place that can deliver most disappointments and where the only change of course possible — other than getting more boots on the ground — is one that would seal his fate as a one-term president like Jimmy Carter. Obama can stay the course there only if foreign policy is going to be a source of success — dumping President Hamid Karzai or seeking accommodation with the Taliban are not going to endear him to the American public or make the world a safer place.

That leaves Iran.

This president started his term speaking in hopeful terms of engagement and a new era in US-Iranian relations. He sought a new beginning and was genuine — if perhaps naive — in his belief that Iran would be moved by his gentler, kinder tone. He has tried the route of engagement and turned it into a strong argument with America’s allies for tougher sanctions against Iran. 

The real question now is, can this president do what, at least on the Upper West Side, at UN headquarters and across Western Europe, appears unthinkable, unfathomable and unacceptable? Could Obama decide, in the next 12-18 months, that a massive military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities could serve many of his foreign policy goals that have eluded him so far and, in the process, reverse his fortunes?

I would not put it past him. This is a president, after all, who made the issue of global nuclear disarmament a top priority and an issue very close to his heart. Seeing Iran go nuclear on his watch and, as a consequence, sweep away the whole notion of a world rid of nuclear weapons, would seal his fate as a one-term president and his legacy forever as an appeaser.

The Middle East will be watching him closely in the next few months. Given the way that political weakness is interpreted in that region, one can expect some provocation before long. Like all challenges predicated on the false assumption that America is in decline, they may just reawaken the sleeping giant.

The post Obama’s Choice appeared first on Standpoint.

This November 2, Obama was not on anyone’s ballot. During his first two years, he seemed indifferent to, or in denial about, the political firestorm growing around him. In January 2010, for example, Arkansas Congressman Marion Berry described Obama’s candid remarks to the House Democratic caucus. Fearing the rising backlash against his programmes, especially health care, Democrats asked how they could avoid a 1994-type cataclysm. Obama answered: “Well, the big difference [between] here and 1994 is you’ve got me.” Apart from unrestrained egotism, Obama’s answer reflected awesome political misjudgment. Bill Clinton, who defeated a Republican incumbent with a 91 per cent approval rating following the first Gulf War, could easily have said exactly the same thing in 1994. Had Obama learned nothing? 

Equally telling was Obama’s blithe observation, also in January 2010, that he would rather be a “really good one-term President than a mediocre two-term President”. Obama’s seemingly casual response showed his confidence that his mere election was so historic that he had no need for an actual record of accomplishment. Moreover, his disdain never diminished for his fellow citizens, whom he once described as “clinging to their guns and religion” against the unknown. Other Democrats exhibited similar contempt for mere voters. In October, for example, Senator John Kerry deigned to observe about the common folks: “It’s absurd. We’ve lost our minds. We’re in a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don’t weigh in. It’s all short-order, lowest-common-denominator, cheap-seat politics.”

By November 2, however, Democratic candidates at every level were fleeing Obama’s embrace. They deeply feared precisely what Republicans sought: a national referendum on his policies and performance. Obama played directly into their hands via a question from the Reverend Al Sharpton: “So even though your name isn’t on the ballot, this is about your agenda and about the progress we’ve seen you begin to make over the past 20-odd months?” Obama responded unhesitatingly: “Absolutely.” And how did he greet the prospect of massive Republican victories? On October 30, he mused: “We can spend the next two years arguing with one another, trapped in stale debates, mired in gridlock, unable to make progress in solving the serious problems facing our country…or we can do what the American people are demanding that we do. We can move forward.” So much for a free market in ideas in the Obama era.

The most revealing crossfire came late in the campaign when the President pleaded, “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us’ — if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election — then I think it’s going to be harder.” On election eve, Republican House leader, now Speaker-elect, John Boehner fired back: “Mr President, there’s a word for people who have the audacity to speak up in defence of freedom, the Constitution and the values of limited government that made our country great. We don’t call them ‘enemies’. We call them ‘patriots’.” Hours before Boehner spoke, but after his prepared remarks were released to the media, Obama agreed he “probably” should not have used the word “enemies”, hardly an upbeat campaign closing for a President. Despite Obama’s last-minute retreat, this exchange of rhetorical salvoes may well foreshadow two difficult years ahead.

The other big 2010 political story was the Tea Party phenomenon and its long-range implications. The Tea Party’s central focus, as its name implies, is reducing government taxation, spending and Federal control over the economy. It is truly a grassroots outpouring, not a structured, hierarchical monolith, calling to mind Will Rogers’s famous quip: “I am not a member of any organised party — I am a Democrat.” Many observers still do not comprehend what moves ordinary, middle-class Americans to become so vociferous. On November 1, for example, a Financial Times reporter referred in the first sentence of a “news” story to “the ultraconservative Tea Party movement”. But, in fact, its growth is best understood simply as a precisely inverse reaction to Obama. In implementing the famous insight “Never let a serious crisis go to waste”, he tried to jam 50-plus years of left-wing frustration through Congress under cover of responding to the 2008 economic crash. He succeeded in part and failed in part, so Tea Partiers will now focus on blocking further government expansion, while simultaneously seeking to roll back changes, such as in healthcare, Obama was able to make. 

What happens for Tea Party backers in foreign and national security policy is less clear. Too many observers simply assume that self-styled Tea Party adherents will advocate massive cuts in defence spending and reducing the American presence overseas. If accurate, this would make the Tea Party little different from the Democrats’ left wing, which refused to acknowledge even Afghanistan as a “good war”, let alone support Bush’s decision to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. But it is entirely consistent with conservative libertarianism to believe in both smaller government and strong national defence. The slogan “peace through strength” sustained the Right throughout the Cold War and Barry Goldwater’s foreign policy manifesto was entitled “Why Not Victory?” rather than “Why Not Isolationism?” Tea Party followers are unambiguous about the UN and the secular religion of multilateralism. Across the movement, there is nary a glimmer of support for entrusting more clout to multilateral bodies, let alone anything even vaguely resembling a reduction of US sovereignty. There is, therefore, scant reason to see the Tea Party joining the Left to support a smaller US global role. 

Now that 2010’s voters have spoken, what will Obama, the first post-American President, do in the next two years? Are they his final two, as he heads towards a Jimmy Carter-like place in history? Or, in 2012, can he “do a Clinton” and win another term? Obama’s choice between alternative paradigms is entirely in his hands. In one, he tracks Clinton’s post-1994 approach, and moves to the centre. Clinton invented “triangulation”, positioning himself between Republican congressional majorities on one hand and congressional Democrats on the other. By being (or at least appearing to be) both centrist and somewhat above the battle, Clinton successfully won re-election in 1996. Call this the pragmatic approach. By contrast, the ideological approach would see Obama continuing to pursue his initial leftist agenda: Europeanising the US health-care system, dramatically increasing Federal taxing and spending, expanding government regulation and control and pursuing priorities not yet enacted, such as further economic restructuring under the guise of protecting against “climate change”. One certainty is that Obama will defend his early victories. Having spilled so much Democratic blood, it is inconceivable he will agree to dismantle, say, his own healthcare reform.

Obama will face stiff Republican opposition in 2012, and perhaps revolt from within his own party. Polling in October showed that, among Democrats, 47 per cent believed he should be challenged for renomination, while 51 per cent did not. Among all voters, 47 per cent favoured his re-election (down from 53 per cent in 2008), with 51 per cent opposed. These levels are stunning, especially since Obama was not matched against specific opponents (although for Democrats, Hillary Clinton may be the ghost of both Christmas Past and Christmas Future). Head-to-head, post-election polls show Obama losing to Republicans Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, but winning against Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. No wonder Obama seems to be in denial.

Today, only Obama himself really knows which alternative he will choose. In a surreal November 3 press conference, Obama admitted he had taken a “shellacking”, but that was little more than a statement of the obvious. He also said: “Over the last two years, we’ve made progress, but clearly too many people haven’t felt that progress yet and they told us that clearly yesterday,” and “I think we’d be misreading the election if we thought that the American people want to see us for the next two years relitigate arguments that we had over the last two years.” Although he made the requisite post-election noises about co-operating with congressional Republicans, the underlying substance of his remarks pointed toward continuing ideological purity. And unmistakably, it showed Obama in continuing stark denial about American political reality.

The Republican and Tea Party election analysis is exactly the opposite: Obama badly misread his 2008 mandate, and his domestic policies ran contrary to the citizenry’s real desires. America was and remains a centre-right nation that was simply fed up with Bush and Republican departures from their basic principles. Accordingly, now is the time to retrench, with government spending and Obama’s healthcare reform first on the chopping block. Under this conservative view, shared by many Democrats, Obama’s only hope is Bill Clinton-style pragmatism.

Critical, however, in Obama’s choice of future direction, is the realm of foreign and national security policy. Obama’s initial preoccupation has been relentlessly, unambiguously domestic, but this need not be the case from now on. Obama has made significant national-security decisions, but only when he had no alternative, when events forced his hand, as in Afghanistan. He has not acted with relish or conviction, other than his all-too-visible unease with exercising American power, even in support of palpable US interests.

It is a commonplace that national leaders, including presidents, frustrated on domestic issues turn their attention and energy to international relations. Thus, the prospect of domestic legislative gridlock for the next two years may cause even Obama to lift up his eyes from his community organiser past. And indeed, just three days after the election, he left Washington for an extended trip to Asia, as though symbolically fleeing a battlefield defeat. But shifting focus will not come easily for Obama and he will not necessarily see a potential political advantage. In the 2010 election, there was hardly a whisper of debate over foreign and national security policy. Even terrorist package bombs en route from Yemen the weekend before the election barely caused a ripple in the political maelstrom enveloping Obama and his party. If Republicans did not win a foreign-policy mandate, and with minimal electoral attention even to life-and-death questions like terrorism, why would Obama look outward?

Perhaps the shortest answer is that he may have no choice. Challenges to America have been rising despite, in fact because of, Obama’s inattention. Terrorism manifestly continues to be a threat, the US is still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan’s stability remains uncertain, rogue states like Iran and North Korea relentlessly seek nuclear weapons, the Arab-Israeli dispute is no closer to resolution, China and Russia are pursuing increasingly aggressive policies, and drug cartels in Mexico are spreading violence across the southern US border, just to name a few issues Obama has essentially tried to ignore. Here is where the constitutional separation of powers predominates, prevailing over November’s Democratic electoral defeats, bad as they were for Obama. The Constitution confers on the president the initiative and principal responsibility for directing foreign policy and even Obama can avoid it for only so long. Two years may be the limit. However, his underlying strategic policy choice arises in foreign affairs as well as domestic: will we see a pragmatic Obama, or a full-ahead ideologue?

First up for the White House is deciding whether it can jam the “New START” arms-control treaty with Russia through Congress’s November lame-duck session. Given the makeup of the incoming Senate in January, Obama either gets this treaty ratified beforehand, or he almost certainly never gets it at all. Prospects for the vote, which requires a Constitutional two-thirds of the Senate to approve the treaty, are dicey. Does Obama really want to invest an enormous amount of scarce political capital on an issue with no domestic constituency? And risk looking even weaker if he loses, as Clinton did when the Senate defeated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1999 (or Woodrow Wilson did when he lost the Treaty of Versailles in 1919)? Will traumatised Democratic Senators facing re-election in 2012 or 2014 really want to jump off this cliff? If Obama cannot get even this bilateral treaty ratified, his vision of “nuclear zero” will be essentially finished and one of his greatest “legacy” projects will lie in ashes. When this article appears in print, we will know how Obama proceeded, thus providing at least one piece of evidence whether he will act pragmatically or full-steam-ahead ideologically. 

Looming next chronologically are decisions on Afghanistan and Iraq, starting with the long-scheduled December review of administration policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Reports from the region are confused, with encouraging signs mixed with more discouraging ones, not least of which was America’s ally, President Hamid Karzai, freely admitting he was in regular, personal receipt of “bags of money” from Iran. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are watching carefully. As their saying goes, “You have the watches, we have the time.” Whether Obama decides to stand by his pledge to begin troop withdrawals from Afghanistan starting in summer 2011 will also foreshadow decisions on troop withdrawals from Iraq, and the larger question of America’s overall role in the Middle East. If the U.S. presence is to decline dramatically, Arab states will reach conclusions about accommodating Iran that can only be negative for the West. Moreover, in terms of presidential election cycles, campaigning for the 2012 party nominations, and the risk of an internal Democratic challenge from Obama’s Left, coincides precisely with the projected drawdown of substantial US forces from Afghanistan.

Significantly, decisions about Afghanistan strategy and troop levels will inevitably have a major impact on Pakistani political stability. Sixty-three years since partition and independence, Pakistani democracy remains fragile and the internal threat from radical Islam is growing, both in civil society and the military. Obama deserves credit for highlighting the continuing risks to Pakistan, which is certainly not an easy place to make progress against the jihadists. But the summer 2011 prospect of cutting and running from Afghanistan only underlines the risks of dangerous repercussion across the Durand Line. This is not the time to go wobbly. Should Pakistan, with its substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons, fall into the hands of radical Islamists, the proliferation implications would be profound, both on the subcontinent and worldwide.

And while Obama may not want to fight a “global war on terrorism”, the terrorists are still waging it against us, as the sophisticated package bombs from Yemen proved. The number of “near misses” by the terrorists against America seems to be rising and accelerating. Already, the strains of the terrorism issue are affecting US politics, demonstrated most notably by the roaring controversy over the proposed Ground Zero mosque. With polling showing overwhelming opposition to the mosque, Obama made himself a political mess, irritating nearly everyone by his ambiguity and flip-flopping, and signalling that 2008’s great campaigner has lost his sure touch. Just a single successful terrorist attack in the US would dominate the political scene indefinitely and, unlike Bush after 9/11, not necessarily to Obama’s advantage.

The President’s nearly two years of effort to restart direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians was never realistic and was not declared formally dead before November 3 only to avoid political embarrassment. Obama shares the basic European analysis that progress on Israel-Palestinian issues will assuage the Muslim world and reduce terrorism. This view has always been erroneous and in any case Obama has failed. There is no sign he has a Plan B, or that the chasm of disagreement between Israel and what passes for non-terrorist Palestinian leadership has any near-term prospect for resolution. 

Persistent nuclear proliferation activities by Iran and North Korea should also be at the top of Obama’s priorities. He has spent two years extending his hand to the rogue states, hoping for negotiations, to date without success. But even if Tehran and Pyongyang return to the bargaining table, they are no more likely today to give up their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes than they have been during the previous ten years of failed negotiations. If North Korea keeps its nuclear arsenal, and Iran acquires one, their success will signal to every other would-be proliferator that it is open season for anyone with the money and the willpower to outlast the US. Both rogue states are global threats, co-operating extensively with each other on nuclear and ballistic missile matters and prepared, as in the case of Syria, to co-operate with others as well. North Korea has long shown its willingness to sell anything to anybody for hard currency, and Iran’s (and Russia’s) involvement with a nascent Venezuelan nuclear programme can only spell trouble ahead.

Speaking of the Western hemisphere, successive US Presidents have not paid adequate attention to Washington’s nearest neighbours. The situation is darkening and not just because of Hugo Chávez. On the southern border, America’s most pronounced problem may no longer be illegal immigration but the growing strength of Mexico’s drug cartels. When Secretary of State Clinton said in September that Mexico reminded her of Colombia 20 years ago, she was, incredibly, explicitly contradicted by Obama within days. Not only is Mexico’s drug violence (29,000 killed in the last four years in drug-related incidents) spilling into Arizona and Texas, but the very fabric of Mexican civil society is being torn apart. Already widespread police and judicial corruption is now exacerbated by increasing physical attacks on local officials and police forces. Even journalists are murdered or intimidated. Just as in Colombia two decades ago, the Mexican government may soon be unable to control large portions of its territory. If Colombia’s drug cartels were threats to hemispheric stability and America, requiring major military operations to control, just think about such a cauldron directly abutting the southern border. 

And then there are the personnel questions. The White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has already left to run for mayor of Chicago, replaced temporarily by a former Senate staffer. The Secretary of Defence Robert Gates has announced his early 2011 departure. General James Jones (former Marine Corps Commandant and Nato Supreme Commander) resigned as National Security Adviser, after an isolated and failed tenure. Say what you will about Jones’s performance, but he was a man of accomplishment. His replacement is another career Democratic staffer. With heavyweight economics advisers such as Christina Romer and former Harvard president Larry Summers already history, can the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner be far behind? Do other high-profile officials such as special envoys George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke really plan to carry on? 

Depending on events in Afghanistan, what of General David Petraeus, the successful leader of Bush’s Iraq surge, and Obama’s third ground commander in Afghanistan in under two years? Will Petraeus leave the army and stand for President or will Obama name him the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thus sidetracking a potential political threat? Obama’s first team is disappearing, replaced by pale imitations of real players. His lower staffing levels in the White House and State Department are more ideologically hard-core, thus perhaps presaging the more reflexive multilateralism favoured by Obama’s enduring European supporters. But for a President in potentially desperate domestic political trouble, kudos from Europeans will mean little. 

The big Washington guessing game is whether Hillary Clinton will leave State, perhaps to challenge Obama for the 2012 Democratic nomination, despite her recent disavowals. Whether she exits or not, Mrs Clinton has not been significant in major Administration decisions and often seems uncomfortable with her portfolio, except for economic and social development issues. Nonetheless, she and her husband remain one of the Democrats’ most astute political teams, and their political careers are far from over. 

Amid so much uncertainty, what emerges starkly is the singular importance of Obama the individual. As Harry Truman observed perceptively, the buck always stops with the President. But this presidency rests so much on the uniqueness of Obama — or at least it always has in his mind and that of his most devoted acolytes — that he alone knows the way ahead. And we can therefore be certain that, much as 2010 was a referendum on Obama’s policies, 2012 will be a referendum on Obama himself.

The post Decision Time for Barack Obama appeared first on Standpoint.

A picture of Barack Obama Sr in his Kenyan home (GETTY IMAGES) 

Europeans are routinely given a pre-packaged portrait of Obama: he is an historic figure, the first African-American president; he is the embodiment of multiracialism and multiculturalism; he is a cosmopolitan, in refreshing contrast to his parochial predecessor; and he looks and speaks the way that many in the world think an American president ought to look and speak. Consequently, Obama’s critics are often dismissed in Europe as a bunch of right-wing fanatics, otherwise known as the Tea Party movement.

So goes the usual propaganda. It was pretty much the same propaganda that helped Obama win. But now Americans have had the opportunity to see what Obama is all about and most of them don’t like it. Obama’s popularity has plummeted. Quite apart from the insatiable right-wing, many moderates and independents who voted for Obama are now suffering buyer’s remorse.

Even some of Obama’s supporters profess to being mystified by what moves the man. Appearing on a TV show, Newsweek editor Evan Thomas said he found himself curiously repelled by a president with whose ideas he generally agreed. Thomas called Obama “slightly creepy” and “deeply manipulative”. He suggested that there was something fake and unreal about Obama’s public persona. 

Theories about Obama abound. On the Left, he is sometimes portrayed as a champion of the civil rights movement, a kind of latter-day Martin Luther King. On the Right, Obama is often described as a closet Muslim or more often as a kind of socialist. Neither of these quite works. Obama has never sat at a segregated lunch counter. In a sense, he’s not even African-American. In the US, this means you are descended from slaves. Obama’s father was an educated immigrant from Kenya and his mother was a white woman from Kansas. Obama’s formative experience, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Kenya, seems very remote from that of Martin Luther King.

There is no evidence that Obama is a Muslim. His father Barack Obama Sr was raised as a Muslim, the consequence of his grand-father Onyango Obama converting to Islam. His stepfather Lolo Soetoro was also raised in the Islamic faith. But neither man practised Islam, and Obama writes that his father treated Islam with the same contempt he reserved for African witch doctors. Obama studied Islam in Indonesia, where he lived for four years, but he also studied Catholicism and Buddhism and he seems to have emerged with no firm religious convictions at all.

The charge of socialism is closer to the mark. Obama as President has presided over the largest expansion of state power in American history. To an unprecedented degree, he has extended the tentacles of the federal government into banking, mortgage lending, finance, healthcare, insurance, automobiles, and energy. In Britain and the rest of Europe, such aggressive intervention is customary, but in America it is an anomaly. While Europeans debate ways to trim the bloated welfare state, Obama continues to make America’s welfare state even more bloated. Consequently, America has become the world’s largest debtor, and Obama threatens to stick the bill to the richest Americans, a group that he says is not paying its “fair share”.

None of this amounts to strict socialism — Obama isn’t threatening state confiscation of private property — but it does represent a movement towards European-style socialism. Even so, the charge of socialism, while it may account for aspects of Obama’s domestic policy, cannot account for his foreign policy. Even Obama’s own backers have noted that he doesn’t seem to share the traditional socialist preoccupations with the poor and with social equality. Obama rarely speaks of either subject with passion. Something else seems to be going on here.

A good way to understand the American president is to ask a simple question: what is Obama’s dream? Fortunately, we don’t have to speculate about this because Obama himself provides a vital clue. Obama’s autobiography is entitled Dreams from My Father. So there it is: according to Obama, his dreams come from his father. It is not Dreams of My Father. Obama isn’t writing about his father’s dreams. He is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

This isn’t just a matter of a book title. Obama’s book is chock-full of admissions that Obama derived his aspirations, his values, his very identity from Obama père. Although his father was gone for most of his life, Obama writes that “even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or to disappoint”. Obama writes: “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.” Others who know Obama confirm this account. Obama’s grandmother Sarah Obama told Newsweek: “I look at him and I see all the same things. This son has taken everything from his father. The son is realising everything the father wanted.”

So who was Barack Obama Sr and what did he want? As a man, the senior Obama was deeply strange. He was a polygamist who had four wives and eight known children. He looked after none of them, and was accused by one of his sons, Mark, of being a wife-beater and an abusive father. He was also a chronic alcoholic who was known at Harvard as “Double Double” because he liked to order a double Scotch and tell the waiter, as soon as it arrived, “Another double.” Since he regularly drove while intoxicated, he was involved in multiple accidents. In one, he killed a man; in another, he injured himself so badly that both his legs had to be amputated and replaced by iron rods. Eventually, he became drunk in a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself. 

Not much of a role model for a son. But young Obama didn’t know about his father’s misdoings, because a romantic image of his father had been cultivated in his mind by his mother, Ann. She revered her husband even though he abandoned her. When Obama complained about his absentee father she chastised her son, informing him that Obama Sr was a great man, a champion of African liberation. 

Eventually, Obama discovered the truth about his father from his half-sister Auma. Still, Obama didn’t give up on his father. He went to his grave and wept. He pressed his hand into the earth and tried to commune with his father “through Africa’s red soil”. But Obama couldn’t get back his dead father, so instead he decided to take his dream. He concluded that, although flawed as a man, the senior Obama had great ideals. Obama would realise those ideals, and perhaps in this way he could complete the family circle and be worthy of his father’s love. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s ideology became the son’s birthright.

But what was Barack Obama Sr’s ideology? First and foremost, he was an anti-colonialist. He came of age in Kenya during that country’s struggle for independence from the British. The Obama family suffered the scars of colonialism. In the 1950s, when the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, cracked down on the Mau Mau guerrillas in Kenya, Obama Sr was arrested for his political activities, and Barack’s grandfather Onyango Obama was placed in a detention camp and allegedly tortured. Anti-colonialism arose out of anger and humiliation, and in the case of Obama Sr those sentiments were the product of direct experience.

I know quite a bit about anti-colonialism because I grew up in India in the period immediately following British rule. Anti-colonialism was very much in the air during the 1960s and 1970s, when I was a boy roaming the streets of Mumbai. My father was an anti-colonialist, as was his father and most of my uncles, and pretty much everyone else I knew. Anti-colonialism was the dominant political ideology in the Third World in the second half of the 20th century. Barack Obama Sr’s anti-colonialism is very familiar to me, although many Americans view it with incomprehension. 

The premises of anti-colonialism, although familiar, are worth spelling out. The general idea is that the world is divided into two camps: the colonisers who are the white West, and the colonised, who are the peoples of the Third World. Anti-colonialists usually assume that the rich countries got rich by invading, occupying and looting the poor countries. Further, they claim that today it is no longer Europe but America that is the rogue elephant stampeding its way across the world. America now invades and occupies other countries in much the same way that the French and the British once did. Anti-colonialists hold that even when colonialism formally ends, there remain powerful concentrations of economic power in the rich countries. These economic elites are faulted with “neocolonialism”, which is colonialism in a new form, economic exploitation. In the anti-colonialist view, these wicked elites — the banks, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the oil companies and so on — continue to oppress not only their own people but also people across the globe. 

Barack Obama Sr was an economist, and he described his economic views as “African socialist”. In 1965, he wrote an article in the East Africa Journal in which he placed his socialist views firmly within the larger framework of anti-colonialism. He began with the anti-colonial objective, which is of course national liberation. But for him, political liberation is not enough. Kenya, after all, became politically independent in 1963. What Obama Sr is concerned about is economic independence. “Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?”

Obama Sr says that since wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of economic elites, “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation”. He proposes state confiscation of land and high taxation with no upper limit. Just in case the point is unclear, He writes: “Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 per cent of income so long as the people get benefits commensurate with the income which is taxed.” 

At first glance, the idea of 100 per cent tax rates seems insane — how could an intelligent man, let alone an economist, propose such a thing? Plug in the anti-colonial assumption, however, and we can see the logic of the proposal. The assumption is that the rich man became rich through exploitation. So if you come to my house and steal my furniture, what’s the appropriate tax rate for you? Well, 100 per cent, because it’s not your furniture. 

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anti-Western, anti-American ideology of Obama Sr that justifies massive state appropriations of private wealth is the belief system of the American president. But that is what I am saying. For instance, I believe that the premises of Obama Sr’s paper can help us understand what President Obama means when he says the rich aren’t paying their “fair share”. The top 10 per cent of income earners in America pay around 70 per cent of the taxes. By ordinary standards, it would seem that the affluent are more than paying their share. However, if you assume that wealth is not earned through effort or creativity but is rather the product of greed and theft, then there is no limit to what percentage you can legitimately seize. Obama’s rhetoric and actions suggest that he feels morally justified in state confiscation of wealth to whatever extent he can get away with it.

The anti-colonial hypothesis is not only psychologically plausible — it is rooted in Obama’s own testimony about his father — but it also has tremendous explanatory power. It can account for Obama’s domestic policy as well as his foreign policy, and it can also explain little details about Obama that no other theory can account for.

Consider Obama’s attitude towards the private sector. He seems to regard the private sector as dominated by greedy, selfish, neocolonial exploiters. He rarely misses a chance to flay Wall Street for its excess, insurance companies for their greed, oil companies for their profiteering and pharmaceutical companies for their exploitative prices. 

His solution seems to be to “decolonise” the private sector by bringing it under the heavy hand of government control. Obama even refuses banks that have received federal bailouts the chance to repay them. He says that first they have to pass a “stress test”. How odd to require a debtor to pass a test before he can give you your money back. Evidently, Obama wants these banks to keep the federal money because with it comes federal control.

Obama’s environmental policies seem designed to enrich the previously colonised countries and impose the cost on the neocolonial West. In his speeches to the United Nations and elsewhere, Obama calls for sharp restrictions on the use of oil, carbon and other resources by the Western developed nations. But he seeks no equivalent restrictions on the Third World. On the contrary, the Obama administration has proposed massive transfers of wealth from the West to the Third World for the purpose of enabling the poor countries to develop new sources of energy. 

In the foreign policy arena, Obama seems to view Iraq and Afghanistan not as venues for a “war on terror”. Indeed, he has virtually banned the term. Rather, Obama appears to view America’s presence in those two countries as the result of wars of colonial occupation. He is determined to withdraw American troops no matter what happens in the aftermath. In Iraq, Obama opposed the “surge” that proved crucial in turning the tide against the insurgency. Iraq remains unstable, but it would be far worse had there been no surge. Obama has already begun a pullout.

He has also announced American withdrawal from Afghanistan starting in 12 months. Recently, the New York Times reported that the Karzai government in Afghanistan has been conducting secret talks with the Taliban. Initially, this appeared to be a regrettable case of untrustworthy allies. When I first read the headline, I thought: “It seems like we can’t trust these Afghans. Just when our back is turned they start making deals with the enemy.” But a few days later the NYT reported that the Obama administration had been orchestrating the secret negotiations. It is Obama who is trying to cut a deal with the Taliban. Once again, it appears as if Obama’s primary objective is to end what he perceives to be a colonial occupation. Whether Karzai rules, or the Taliban rule, or some combination of the two, seems to be a secondary consideration for him.

Now consider the lethargy with which Obama collects international signatures to discourage Iran from building a nuclear bomb. Let’s acknowledge that it’s not easy to deter the mullahs from doing something that they very much want to do. Still, it seems that America should at least pursue policies that have a reasonable prospect of stopping the Iranian bomb. If not, then at least admit that Iran is going to get the bomb and take measures designed to prevent that bomb from posing a lethal threat to Israel or the West. Instead, Obama seems content to pursue a series of symbolic measures, including symbolic sanctions that have virtually no chance of convincing the mullahs to give up their nuclear ambitions.

Obama’s lethargy in blocking Iran’s nuclear project contrasts sharply with his effectiveness in reducing America’s nuclear arsenal. At a recent summit, Obama announced that America and Russia would both be sharply cutting their nuclear stockpiles. The Russian stockpile is mostly decayed, so the net effect is severely to scale back the American arsenal. Obama’s rhetoric was suitably lofty: this was all part of his dream to move us closer to a world free of nuclear weapons. Still, the cynic may be forgiven for noting that the only nuclear arsenal under Obama’s control was that of the US, so the only way he could move us closer to a nuclear-free world was to slash his own country’s stockpile.

Following his nuclear summit, many American conservatives criticised Obama for his foolish hope that a US nuclear reduction would inspire the Iranians and perhaps the North Koreans to limit their own nuclear aspirations. If Obama actually thought this, he would indeed be a fool. But plug in the anti-colonial hypothesis and a more plausible explanation emerges for Obama’s actions. Perhaps Obama views America, not Iran or North Korea, as the rogue nation that has the biggest arsenal, has actually used nuclear weapons in the past and poses the greatest threat to world security. If so, then Obama’s goal was not to influence Iran or North Korea but rather to reduce America’s arsenal, and in this he was completely successful. 

Consider a final detail that puts the icing, if you will, on the anti-colonial theory. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Obama decided to return a bust of Winston Churchill that had been displayed in the Oval Office. The bust had been loaned to America from the British government’s art collection, and to many Britons it symbolised America’s relationship with Britain. Chagrined by Obama’s decision to return it, British officials suggested the bust could be displayed elsewhere in the administration. Obama refused and the bust now sits in the residence of the British ambassador.

Now recall Obama’s prejudice against Britain for its colonial rule in Kenya. Recall, also, that Churchill was a champion of British colonialism. He famously said he had not become Prime Minister in order to preside over the end of the British Empire. As noted earlier, he was also Prime Minister in the 1950s when British forces arrested both Obama’s father and grandfather in connection with the Mau Mau revolt. Later, Churchill blocked efforts to have a government investigation of the alleged atrocities in Kenya. So when we use the anti-colonial model we have a perfectly good explanation for Obama’s hostility to Britain in general, and Churchill in particular. Remove the anti-colonial model and Obama’s action in removing the Churchill bust becomes inexplicable.

The world has changed a great deal since the anti-colonial heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. Today countries are rising up not through state socialism but by using what has been termed “the advantage of backwardness”. Countries such as India, China, Indonesia and Chile are using their low labour costs to make stuff that other people around the world want to buy. Thus they are growing at rapid rates. Many countries once labelled “Third World” have now become “emerging markets” and they are engines of global prosperity. 

Many in Britain, I know, are deeply ambivalent about Britain’s colonial legacy. But colonialism is now dead and so is anti-colonialism. No one today cares about it — except the man in the White House. He is the last anti-colonial. Obama’s problem isn’t that he opposes foreign subjugation. It is that he is trapped in his father’s time machine. He is trying to apply the ossified, antiquated solutions of a generation ago to the very different problems of the world today. Obama’s approach does poor countries no favours, because his remedies would not help them rise out of poverty. At the same time, Obama is trying to end America’s leadership in the world, bringing to an end centuries of Western dominance. If he succeeds, the future for both America and Europe is likely to be less prosperous and less secure.  

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