Hosni Mubarak, when he came under general pressure. When the anti-democratic Muslim Brotherhood was elected to lead the government and set out to rewrite the new constitution unilaterally, somewhat in the manner of Salvador Allende in Chile in the early seventies, and then a military regime seized power in reaction, the administration remonstrated ineffectually and implausibly with the new regime in favor of the Brotherhood and its ousted and no longer overly popular leaders. The administration continued to provide Pakistan with aid that it knew was being sent on to a Taliban faction in Afghanistan that was diligently murdering American and allied soldiers. As this is written, it is not clear that anything will have been accomplished by the sanctions placed on Iran, consistently less severe than those voted by the Congress, to frustrate that country’s quest for a nuclear military capacity. The danger of that country becoming a nuclear power—followed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—is a very disturbing one, and America’s failure of leadership is largely responsible for the concern.
Truckling to the Palestinians over settlements, a red herring considering that Israel proved in Sinai and Gaza that it would uproot its settlers in compliance with a real peace and not just another land-for-peace scam, produced no progress in Israel-Palestine relations. The British effectively sold the same real estate to two opposed parties and there has never been any solution except to divide the old Palestine Mandate in two; fixating on settlements is just a delaying action. There will be no resolution until the Arabs accept Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist as a Jewish state. Pretending to ignore Turkish posturing in the Arab world and saber-rattling at Israel, and the imposition of repressive measures within Turkey, has just encouraged more of it all. A retrenchment to the United States was disguised as a “pivot to Asia,” though not very successfully. There is general skepticism in the world that the United States has any staying power. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expenditure of nearly 58,000 American casualties and two trillion dollars has not produced any discernible strategic benefit for the United States and its allies, and has strained those alliances. The elimination of the Saddam Hussein government in Baghdad and the killing or immobilization of significant numbers of terrorists have been useful, but not cost-effective.
There is no evidence that any serious strategic analysis has gone into any of this, but President Obama continues to claim that all developments are the product of his administration’s skillful diplomacy, “backed by force.” There is surprisingly wide acceptance within the United States of this now very familiar revisionist delusion. The disintegration of Ukraine was long seen as an occasion for patching relations with Russia and not as the central issue between the nativists and Western emulators in Central Europe, nor as the opportunity it is to extend the borders of the West and strengthen the hand of the party of international conciliation and domestic reform in Russia.
Generally, the withdrawal of the United States from its former over-exposed Cold War involvement in every corner of the earth is a good thing, and regional balances are developing in Europe and East Asia. All regions should be able to manage their own affairs, and the rationale for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s launch of the United States into durable positions of normative and deterrent influence in Western Europe and the Far East has been made less urgent by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and by the comparative embrace of rational national behavior by the Chinese. Such withdrawals are more a demonstration of the success of the containment policy pursued between the Roosevelt/Truman administrations and those of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, than a manifestation of durable American irresolution. But such comprehensive initiatives should be carefully planned and executed and explained, and not just left to devolve in a series of inelegant improvisations as they have.
It remains a fortunate time for a country to lose its capacity for correct strategic analysis and policy formulation and execution. Western Europe is not under threat, and Germany is now tentatively exercising its potential, for the third time, as Europe’s greatest power, but this time, unlike the imperial and Nazi experiences, in close alliance with its neighbors and trans-Atlantic allies, and entirely as a champion of democratic government and human liberty. This transformation of a unified Germany must rank as one of the very greatest achievements of American statesmanship, and one which will bear the fruit of stability and prosperity in Europe for a very long time. As this is written, Germany is instrumental in the apparent victory of the Western emulators over the Russian nativists and annexationists in Ukraine, despite the Russian seizure of Crimea, and possibly some other ethnic Russian sections of Ukraine as a consolation prize for its definitive loss of that central country that it had occupied for two centuries. China is flexing its muscles in the manner of inexperienced new powers (like Bismarck and Theodore Roosevelt), but is not really threatening anyone. And it should be possible to help coordinate a containment strategy, to the extent one is required, with Japan, India, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Burma (where the Chinese overplayed their hand and have effectively been evicted as the chief influence). In Latin America, the economically sensible and reasonably democratic countries are steadily outpacing the detritus of the Castroite left in Argentina, Venezuela, and a few other countries.
As usual, except when countries have their backs to the wall and the United States is their principal hope for salvation, America’s allies are happy enough to have a rather feckless regime floundering through these recent years in Washington, apart from the continuing accrual of very large government deficits in the United States. These deficits are made more unsettling by the fact that they are largely financed not by arm’s-length auctions of government securities, but by the U.S. Federal Reserve, a subsidiary of the Treasury, purporting to “buy” the unsold securities with the issuance of notes for the purpose. The contribution of the United States to monetary instability has been very serious and uninterrupted throughout the Obama presidency. This defies one of the original justifications provided by George Washington for forming an “indissoluble Union”: to create and maintain a valuable and reliable currency.
The threat to American strategic interests and national security, despite the terrorist nuisance which ultimately all governments will oppose, is not principally from outside the United States. American federal politics seem to have become almost dysfunctional, as very little can be got through the Congress, where the Republicans control the House of Representatives, and both parties shriek epithets at each other rather than compromise in the traditional and more productive way of American legislators. And the role of money in American government is becoming steadily more prevalent and disturbing.
There is plenty of evidence, including poor voter turnouts and low-quality candidates for national office, that the country is dismayed and is fearful of bad political management. But these are the times when countries can afford a comparatively great exposure to misgovernment. The United States remains fundamentally the world’s most powerful country, and though China could mount a threat eventually, there is no historical evidence that China seeks more than a position of respect in the world and deference from its neighbors. Increasingly, as the United States rolls its forces back from the world, concerns about ineptitude in American strategic leadership are moderated by the absence of serious threats from other countries, and by the complete absence of any professed American vocation to occupy or otherwise intrude upon other countries.
As for the quality of American leadership, it is this author’s contention that the Watergate fiasco effectively deterred the best possible candidates from seeking the highest offices for a whole generation, with the halcyon exception of the Reagan presidency. But the headship of the United States remains the greatest office within the gift of any people or political system. The office has not sought the man since Washington, but the men and women seeking the office will become worthy of it again. In a phrase of Charles de Gaulle about his own country in the fifties, the United States is “crossing the desert,” but there is no reason to doubt that it will arrive in tolerably good health on the other side. All great nationalities possess the genius of renewal, as China and Germany, in very different ways, are demonstrating. The United States will surely find and elevate leaders who understand and are capable of continuing the successes of the principal statesmen whose strategic insights and execution are recounted in the following pages.
—Conrad Black
Toronto, March 2014