In today’s foreign-relations climate, even a
Jimmy Carter would seem like a godsend.
The deer-in-the-headlights Obama reactions to the Ebola
crisis and the so-called lone-wolf Islamist terrorists remind the world that a
particular sort of political correctness overrides American realism about even
our national security. When the U.S. government seems less concerned with
protecting its own citizens and more worried about losing its politically correct
multicultural fides, then most of our enemies assume, even if wrongly, that
they are not going to face an angry, unpredictable, and devastating response to
their aggression.
Trivialities
can become iconic: Obama once shut down U.S. travel into Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion
airport, but did not curtail U.S. connecting flights to and from Liberia — the
common denominator not being security worries as much as multicultural
politics. Just as the Obama administration was confused about the Islamic State
(from “jayvee” to “manageable problem” to existential threat), confused about
the Free Syrian Army (from “amateurs” to the foundation of our ground strategy
against the Islamic State), confused about post-American Iraq (“secure,”
“stable,” “greatest achievement”), and confused about Ebola (little chance of
infection in the U.S., no need to restrict flights, need to restrict arrivals
to targeted airports, no quarantines, some quarantines, etc.), so too our
enemies will believe that we are confused about their intent and actions.
The danger from Islamist terror in the next two years is
not that Obama might not reply strongly to it (he might well, given a Republican
Congress and overwhelming public sentiment), but that he has clumsily given
indications (the apology tour, the mythographies about Islam, the loud
remonstrations with Israel, the surreal euphemisms about jihadist violence, the
inane commentary about Islamism from CIA Director John Brennan and Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper, the outreach to Hamas, etc.) that he
envisions “root causes” that prompt understandable violence. Such impressions,
again whether legitimate or not, will only encourage more terrorist attempts in
the upcoming two years, which will ultimately demand risky responses, in a
fashion that transcends Obama’s preference for drone executions.
Six years of open borders, coupled with fraudulent
statistics about enforcement, have changed the American Southwest. For all
practical purposes, there is no longer a secure southern border or a definable
notion of U.S. citizenship. For the sake of adding to the pool of future Obama
constituents, we are losing the very notion of an autonomous United States with
a sacrosanct legal system and national sovereignty. If Mexico were shorn of its
romance, then its behavior would be seen more as that of a belligerent than as
that of a friend. Its policy toward the United States is patently anti-American:
ship across the border its own impoverished peoples against U.S laws, thereby
winning billions of dollars in remittances, transferring billions of dollars in
social-services costs from Mexico to the U.S., creating a powerful pro-Mexican
expatriate constituency inside the U.S., and avoiding needed social reform at
home by exporting potential dissidents. Unless we end illegal immigration,
adopt meritocratic, ethnically blind, and more limited legal immigration, and
return to assimilationist practices, a new buffer state neither quite Mexican
nor quite American will replace much of the present landscape of the Southwest.
Finally, an additional $7 trillion of national
debt, continued $600 billion–plus budget deficits after tax hikes and
sequestration, huge increases in entitlements and government regulations, and
the failed stimuli of zero interest rates, big deficits, and government
expansion all suggest to enemies that at some point soon the U.S. will not have
the wherewithal to defend its interests even if it wished to. Or is it worse
than that? The move to European social democracy by intent ensures that there
will be fewer dollars for defense, as in Europe — and that, in the eyes of the
Obama administration, is a good thing, consistent with an overriding
therapeutic view of human nature. Hard powers like the Chinese, Iranians,
jihadists, and Russians all welcome the new U.S. preference for EU-like soft
power.
After the election we will be entering one of the most
dangerous phases of U.S. foreign relations since the late 1970s.The problem is
not just that there are no Ronald Reagans around, but that even a Jimmy Carter
would now seem like a godsend.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a
senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.
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