Axis of Fantasy vs.
Axis of Reality
When the history of
the Obama administration's foreign policy is written 20 or so years from now,
the career of Wendy Sherman, our chief nuclear negotiator with Iran, will be
instructive.
In 1988, the former
social worker ran the Washington office of the Dukakis campaign and worked at the
Democratic National Committee. That was the year the Massachusetts governor carried
111 electoral votes to George H.W. Bush's 426. In the mid-1990s, Ms. Sherman
was briefly the CEO of something called the Fannie Mae Foundation, supposedly a
charity that was shut down a decade later. From there it was on to the State
Department, where she served as a point person in nuclear negotiations with North Korea
and met with Kim Jong Il himself. The late dictator, she testified, was
"witty and humorous," "a conceptual thinker," "a quick
problem-solver," "smart, engaged, knowledgeable,
self-confident." Also a movie buff who loved Michael Jordan highlight
videos. A regular guy!
Later Ms. Sherman was
to be found working for her former boss as the No. 2 at the
Albright-Stonebridge Group before taking the No. 3 spot at the State
Department. Ethics scolds might describe the arc of her career as a revolving
door between misspending taxpayer dollars in government and mooching off them
in the private sector. But it's mainly an example of failing up—the
Washingtonian phenomenon of promotion to ever-higher positions of authority and
prestige irrespective of past performance.
This administration in
particular is stuffed with fail-uppers—the president, the vice president, the
secretary of state and the national security adviser, to name a few—and every
now and then it shows. Like, for instance, when people for whom the test of
real-world results has never meant very much meet people for whom that test
means everything.
That's my read on last
weekend's scuttled effort in Geneva to strike a nuclear bargain with Iran. The
talks unexpectedly fell apart at the last minute when French Foreign Minister
Laurent Fabius publicly objected to what he called a "sucker's deal,"
meaning the U.S. was prepared to begin lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange
for tentative Iranian promises that they would slow their multiple nuclear programs.
Not stop or suspend
them, mind you, much less dismantle them, but merely reduce their pace from run
to jog when they're on Mile 23 of their nuclear marathon. It says something
about the administration that they so wanted a deal that they would have been
prepared to take this one. This is how people for whom consequences are
abstractions operate. It's what happens when the line between politics as a
game of perception and policy as the pursuit of national objectives dissolves.
The French are not
such people, believe it or not, at least when it comes to foreign policy.
Speculation about why Mr. Fabius torpedoed the deal has focused on the pique
French President François Hollande felt at getting stiffed by the U.S. on his
Mali intervention and later in the aborted attack on Syria. (Foreign ministry
officials in Paris are still infuriated by a Susan Rice tirade in
December, when she called a French proposal to intervene in Mali
"crap.")
But the French also
understand that the sole reason Iran has a nuclear program is to build a
nuclear weapon. They are not nonchalant about it. The secular republic has
always been realistic about the threat posed by theocratic Iran. And they have
come to care about nonproliferation too, in part because they belong to what is
still a small club of nuclear states. Membership has its privileges.
This now puts the
French at the head of a de facto Axis of Reality, the other prominent members
of which are Saudi Arabia and Israel. In this Axis, strategy is not a game of
World of Warcraft conducted via avatars in a virtual reality. "We are not
blind, and I don't think we're stupid," a defensive John Kerry said over the
weekend on "Meet the Press," sounding uncomfortably like Otto West
(Kevin Kline) from "A Fish Called Wanda." When you've reached the "don't call
me stupid" stage of diplomacy, it means the rest of the world
has your number.
Now the question is
whether the French were staking out a position at Geneva or simply demanding to
be heard. If it's the latter, the episode will be forgotten and Jerusalem and
Riyadh will have to reach their own conclusions about how to operate in a
post-American Middle East. If it's the former, Paris has a chance to fulfill
two cherished roles at once: as the de facto shaper of European policy on the
global stage, and as an obstacle to Washington's presumptions to speak for the
West.
A decade ago, Robert
Kagan argued that the U.S. operated in a Hobbesian world of power politics
while Europe inhabited the Kantian (and somewhat make-believe) world of right.
That was after 9/11, when fecklessness was not an option for the U.S.
Under Mr. Obama,
there's been a role reversal. The tragedy for France and its fellow members of
its Axis is that they may lack the power to master a reality they perceive so
much more clearly than the Wendy Shermans of the world, still failing up.
The original link can be found at: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304644104579190024212147260
Poster's comments:
1) The people who live there will take care of their
own problems in their own way.
2) The Persians
(Iranians if you will) are of European stock, if you buy the H.G. Wells reports
in his book "Outline of History", first published in 1920 I think. Even the "gulf" there is named "Persian gulf" or "Arabian gulf", depending on your politics.
3) The weather in the region is always
"quirky", like what might be down range impacts of war with nuclear
weapons involved. The monsoon seasonal weather flows are involved, too.
4) I personally don't want my Family and Friends
"involved" over there because of incompetent leaders in the West
trying to get involved in their own way and for their own purposes. I
especially dislike reacting vice acting. Even Clement Atlee in England (the first PM after Churchill) got a lot of Americans killed in Korea, later.
5) That the USA is now disarming means that while we
might get still involved militarily over there, we can't sustain it in any reasonable way. In
other words, some of our loved ones will probably die an early and often miserable
death as a consequence, especially those at the point of the spear. Said even
another way, those that live there (vice those in the West) are in the driver's seat, so to speak.
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