Niall Ferguson on US strategy in the Middle East:
Henry Kissinger long ago recognized the problem: a talented vote-getter, surrounded by lawyers, who is overly risk-averse. Even before becoming Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger understood how hard it was to make foreign policy in Washington. There “is no such thing as an American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in 1968. There is only “a series of moves that have produced a certain result” that they “may not have been planned to produce.” It is “research and intelligence organizations,” he added, that “attempt to give a rationality and consistency” which “it simply does not have.”
Two distinctively American pathologies explained the fundamental absence of coherent strategic thinking. First, the person at the top was selected for other skills. “The typical political leader of the contemporary managerial society,” noted Mr. Kissinger, “is a man with a strong will, a high capacity to get himself elected, but no very great conception of what he is going to do when he gets into office.”
Second, the government was full of people trained as lawyers. In making foreign policy, Mr. Kissinger once remarked, “you have to know what history is relevant.” But lawyers were “the single most important group in Government,” he said, and their principal drawback was “a deficiency in history.” ……..
It is clear that [Barack Obama’s] strategy is failing disastrously. Since 2010, total fatalities from armed conflict in the world have increased by a factor of close to four, according to data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Total fatalities due to terrorism have risen nearly sixfold, based on the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism database. Nearly all this violence is concentrated in a swath of territory stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there is every reason to expect the violence to escalate as the Sunni powers of the region seek to prevent Iran from establishing itself as the post-American hegemon.
Today the U.S. faces three strategic challenges: the maelstrom in the Muslim world, the machinations of a weak but ruthless Russia, and the ambition of a still-growing China. The president’s responses to all three look woefully inadequate……
Some things you can learn on the job, like tending bar or being a community organizer. National-security strategy is different. “High office teaches decision making, not substance,” Mr. Kissinger once wrote. “It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it.” The next president may have cause to regret that Barack Obama didn’t heed those words. In making up his strategy as he has gone along, this president has sown the wind. His successor will reap the whirlwind. He or she had better bring some serious intellectual capital to the White House.
Source: Niall Ferguson: The Real Obama Doctrine – Real Daily Buzz
Sadly Ferguson is mostly right. But his premise assumes that a really good President could do what King Canute couldn’t, which is to hold back the tide. Obama is probably the best President the USA could have had given the dreadful mess left behind by the Clinton-Bush years, because he hasn’t made catastrophic errors.
Even more sadly is that the measure of a US President these days is one who hasn’t totally screwed up (Ref Clinton’s giving bankers free reign to gamble with deposits; and Bush-the-Dopier’s brilliant idea to sack the defeated Iraqi army but not confiscate their weapons). Both of these historic examples of incompetency, which even a 10 year old could have seen were bad ideas, have plunged the world into the worst mess it’s ever been in since the meteorite struck. Not even Superman could sort that mess out, and Obama is no Superman.
But then again, a century of plundering Middle Eastern oil without economic flow-on was always going to piss someone off eventually. And the Islamic religion, like the Christian one, can justify anything.
Obama is barely treading water; but Ferguson is right – his successor will be utterly swept away unless a loony like Trump gets in and presses the big red button because he has no other means of exerting influence.
As much as I hate guns, if I lived in the US I’d be buying up big.
Joining frankaquin0 , but disagreeing about Ferguson
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Can’t this man be sectioned?
He reminds me of a typical American because unlike Kissinger, he does not have broad underlying connection with the world and assesses as if the world can be analysed with 101 course notes.
Where we are now is a product of American bases shoved insensitively into the heart of Saudi Arabia for oil security and the Iraq invasion; inevitable from Bush’s election due to a belief that there has been an Iraqi assassination plot aimed at his father .
Obama’s inheritance as a result was the worst you can imagine in terms of what to do and how to react . Inheriting Hitler and Japan by contracts had nice simple choices .
Niall Ferguson is correct. Obama has no sense of history. In high school, he was, in his words, in a marijuana haze. In college, he was a black studies major in college that is why his college transcripts are under lock and key. He has only a legal education. Face it, he is a community organizer on the world stage. Both Bush and Clinton made huge mistakes, I totally agree. But history will judge Obama harshly. He was not intellectually prepared for the job and the world is suffering because of this.