Charles Krauthammer and Bill Schneider
offer contrasting takes. Krauthammer as always makes some powerful
points. His catalogue of Obama's failures to date is correct, isn't it?
In particular, Russia's lack of response to the administration's multi-track overtures has received too little attention.
And what's come from Obama's single most dramatic foreign policy stroke -- the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.
But maybe not gratuitous. Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends. Some brilliant secret trade-off to get strong Russian support for stopping Iran from going nuclear before it's too late? Just wait and see, said administration officials, who then gleefully played up an oblique statement by President Dmitry Medvedev a week later as vindication of the missile defense betrayal.
The Russian statement was so equivocal that such a claim seemed a ridiculous stretch at the time. Well, Clinton went to Moscow this week to nail down the deal. What did she get?
"Russia Not Budging On Iran Sanctions: Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart." Such was The Washington Post headline's succinct summary of the debacle.
You can make a better case than Krauthammer allows for changing the missile-shield policy, but the fact that Russia hasn't budged on Iran is indeed a notable failure.
Krauthammer goes much further, of course, and says that calling Obama's Nobel merely "premature" is absurd. He thinks we can already write off the administration's whole approach. There he loses me. Such certainty, less than a year in, seems as daft as saying it's all going great.
Schneider seems to think the Nobel makes sense, but only if the rest of the world acts to make Obama's approach viable. Well, yes, if only--but how likely is that? I found these sentences, which imply that the Nobel will itself strengthen Obama's hand, hard to credit.
The peace prize should bolster Obama's efforts to isolate Iran diplomatically and enforce tough sanctions if that nation refuses to comply with demands to end its nuclear weapons program... The prize should help Obama bring Israel and the Palestinians to the negotiating table... The prize should encourage Obama to resist pressure from the U.S. military to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
In each case, the idea seems to be that the prize will elicit closer co-operation from other countries. But why should it do that, for heaven's sake? By creating a sense of obligation? I don't get it.
A closing thought on "what they meant by it". The estimable Gene Robinson (here) and Juan Williams (on TV last weekend) both said the Nobel committee meant to praise the country as well as Obama, and that criticising the award was therefore anti-American (according to Robinson) or churlish (according to Williams).
I don't think so. I go along with Robinson this far: I saw the committee's otherwise inexplicable award mainly as an expression of thanks that the United States has finally managed to elect an internationally presentable president--that is, one who thinks like they do. As others have said, it is indeed an award to Obama for not being George W. Bush.
But bear this in mind. Bush was quintessentially American in the eyes of many Europeans--that is why they hated him. He won two presidential elections (and the second, after four years in office, was undisputed). What appalling judgment those people have. Praise be. This time, somehow, they rose above their backwardness and elected Obama. He is far more like us. Well done, America!
I'd call that a backhanded compliment.
He won two presidential elections (and the second, after four years in office, was undisputed).
Speaking of backhanded compliments...
What goes unmentioned in your account, as it does of course in Krauthammer's, is an analysis of precisely why Iran is an American problem; why twenty years after the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union so many people seem to think that we are still engaged in a policy of containment (of Russia now), on which our survival presumably depends (again, why?); and why for all practical reasons the eastern perimeter of our national defense begins at the Russian/Polish border.
There may well be defensible reasons why, uniquely in the history of the world, the United States has fought as many major wars as we have without fighting one in our own hemisphere since the 19th century and without fighting one against a near neighbor since the middle of the 19th century. But it isn't something we ever discuss.
Given our fiscal state and the prospect that it will soon be much worse, a national conversation is long overdue.
Yep, you have that right. A very backhanded compliment. But the Nobel award is also a sign of how lost in space is the conventional European perception in relation to its own geopolitical situation.
Europe is completely dependent on US force:
in the mid-east for its oil,
Mediterranean for oil and trade.
North and South Atlantic for trade
Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn oil and trade.
Europe on its own can do nothing against Iranian Nuclear Enrichment or deter Iran from building missiles.
What can Angela Merkel do internationally to protect Germany or help protect Europe?
It has difficulty dealing with Russia on energy.
Turkey treats Europe with contempt and in reality won't bother to try to join the EU at this point. In fact if nothing is done about Iran, I predict that Turkey will announce its own nuclear weapons program within twelve months.
The Europe as a whole or as individual nations is becoming much less relevant in relation to the important international issues.
Europeans take US military force so totally for granted, that they can no longer measure what it does for the general quality of existence that they live in: democracy, freedom, trade, culture, standard of living etc.
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama is indeed a backhanded compliment, but also a very strong indication of the world view of Europeans.
The statements that "Krauthammer as always makes some powerful points" and that "his catalogue of Obama's failures to date is correct", are ludicrous. Every statement in Krauthammer's excerpt is bombastic and distorted.
Deciding against placing missile defense sites in eastern Europe was hardly "selling out our friends", nor was it a "crushing blow" for the Polish and the Czechs. The move appears to be popular in those countries.
Of course, it is unlikely that we will know the true backstory for decades nonetheless, the official line that the decision will better address the threats Iran will be fielding and will do so at an earlier date, is entirely plausible. Whereas Krauthammer's apparent assumption that Obama considered this to be the "betrayal" of friends, but believed that fact outweighed by the probability that Russia would back his sanctions in return, is a tough sell, to put it mildly.
"it [the Nobel Peace Prize] is indeed an award to Obama for not being George W. Bush."
I'd like to point out that I'm not George W. Bush, so where's MY award? Heck Clive, you're not George W. Bush either. Where's your prize?
If that was the bar to clear, there are billions of Chineese that aren't George Ww. Bush either. They should have won. Or you. Or me.
I am really fed up with the thoughtless acceptance of statements like this from commentators all across the media:
"For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection."
Krauthammer is talking nonsense here. The missile defense sites were wildly unpopular amongst the populations in these countries - their leaders were doing us a favour by allowing them to be placed there.
But even if this were not true, I'd ask you to consider a version of US foreign policy that says we must keep militarily useless sites operating in a strategically unimportant area while at the same time being UNABLE to protect Israel just because their removal would make Russia happy. Why should we be held hostage to a bad policy just because reversing it might be favoured by people that we don't always like? For heaven's sakes.