Obama's Red-Line Presidency

Henninger: Obama's Red-Line Presidency

 The next president will have to restore the tradition of durable U.S. foreign commitments.

 

By Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal

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'We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that's a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons."— Barack Obama, Aug. 20, 2012

"First of all, if you've got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you."—Barack Obama, multiple versions

What would you rather be: an American lost inside an ObamaCare exchange or a Syrian rebel? No matter who gets touched by the helping hand of Barack Obama, the problem is not merely the broken promise but the chaos that follows the break.

Start with ObamaCare. When Mr. Obama addressed the nonperformance of HealthCare.gov, here's one of the things he said: "What we're also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy."

Come again? You're discovering this? It sounds as if ObamaCare was sprung over beer-and-pretzels by a bunch of guys watching hoops at the White House.

The one group of people in the world who would believe this is how ObamaCare came to life would be the Syrian rebels. They also got hit by a glitch.

In August, Bashar Assad gassed and killed some 1,400 people, many children. He crossed the famous Obama "red line." John Kerry, Susan Rice and Samantha Power gave powerful speeches about the need to respond. Policy makers in Washington, Paris, Riyadh, Jerusalem and Damascus expected the U.S. to hit Assad's air-force assets.

Didn't happen. Mr. Obama pivoted to Russian President Vladimir Putin's idea that Assad would let his cache of chemical weapons be destroyed.

The first tangible result of this post-red-line deal was that the Syrian civil war evaporated from the news. The war didn't stop; it vanished.

The Wall Street Journal this week reported an update on the Obama-Putin deal to destroy Assad's murderous chemicals. It made one blink in disbelief. No country in the world is willing to dispose of Assad's chemical weapons on its territory. Too dangerous.

So on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend the Obama White House put out Plan B.

It's somehow going to move the most lethal chemicals—mustard gas, sarin, VX—to a ship outfitted "with field deployable hydrolysis system technology," sail out onto the ocean somewhere and destroy the stuff with neutralizing caustic chemicals. Where are the save-the-whales people when you need them? Even the ocean has to take the fall for another Obama policy lurch.

Mr. Obama has now committed the U.S. to another major project: slowing or ending (it's hard to tell which exactly) Iran's nuclear-bomb program. Here Mr. Obama decided he would largely dismantle the economic sanctions regime against Iran. This was an international red line painstakingly assembled over 10 years. It was working. Three days before Mr. Obama announced the interim deal, the National Iranian Gas Co. declared bankruptcy.

Rather than let the mullahs deal with the rising stress of economic disintegration, Mr. Obama replaced the sanctions with his own negotiating red line: a six-month moratorium, which is "reversible."

It wouldn't matter if Team Obama was improvising policy with things no one cares about, say, wrecking a bank. But skateboarding through the U.S. health-insurance system or America's foreign-policy commitments can produce broad-based ruin.

The U.S.'s postwar system of foreign alliances is cracking, or even collapsing.

Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally since the 1930s, is now openly derisive of the president. Egypt's military government just announced an era of "historic strategic relations" with Russia. Israel calls the Iran initiative a "historic mistake." What all these American allies have in common is that their insurance agreements with the U.S. have been canceled. But no worries; it'll be replaced with something "better."

The famous Obama "pivot" toward Asia has gone slack. Vice President Joe Biden is now visiting Japan, China and South Korea—and not only because of China's multiple claims to hegemony over the region's waters.

As with Russia in the Middle East, China's top leaders exploited Mr. Obama's hither-and-thither foreign policy. When the president skipped two Asian-nation summits in October (blaming the government shutdown morass), China's attending leadership proposed an array of economic cooperation plans for the region.

This is a troubled moment in the U.S.'s relations with the world. What's missing, astonishingly, is a sustained Republican voice on foreign policy. The Democrats carpet-bombed George Bush because he was so unpopular in places like Sweden. The GOP's major figures look frozen in the headlights of opinion polls that put isolationist sentiment above 50%. This vacuum of ideas will default the commander-in-chief issue in 2016 to the only candidate who was formerly secretary of state.

It's looking to the world outside our borders as if America's red lines can be blurred, moved or erased at whim. The next president will have to restore the idea of a U.S. commitment to its original, more durable meaning.