Since January 2009, President Obama has pursued a foreign policy designed to remove the United States from nettlesome foreign entanglements. The world has watched and understood. President Obama now discovers that the United States is running out of foreign influence. Any realpolitik analyst would anticipate such an outcome. For Obama, the unfocused dreamer, reality has come as a complete shock.
Reality has finally dawned because of Obama’s inability to bring back Edward Snowden to so-called American ‘justice’. Foreign powers, great and small, evidence schadenfreude, as they watch the United States president slowly twisting in a biting wind of his own creation.
But much more is awash for Obama’s America than Edward Snowden. Afghanistan’s understated debacle is a spectacular example. Last week, the Taliban opened an office in Doha for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan – the name that Mullah Omar gave to his regime before its 2001 downfall at the hands of President George W Bush. In response to this office opening, President Hamid Kharzai shut down negotiations with the United States over post-2014 security cooperation.
So what has really happened? Merely to get the Taliban to the table for a bogus peace process, Obama and Kerry agreed, at the urging of Pakistan, to allow Mullah Omar to access the negotiations on his own terms: no acceptance of the Afghan Constitution, no ceasefire with international forces, not even a pledge never again to allow Afghanistan to become a haven for international terrorism. Worse still, Obama and Kerry are to allow the terrorist Haqqani network – whose exploits include the 2011 siege of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul – a seat at the table.
So, having legitimized Haqqani and given the Taliban everything it wanted, in exchange for nothing, the U.S. now finds itself dumped by its own client government in Kabul. That government can always turn to Iran as a substitute patron. No peace, no peace process, no ally, no leverage and no moral standing, all in a single stroke.
Well done, Barack Obama and John Kerry! You truly have shown British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, how far appeasement can really go when genuine pacifists come to power.
As for the American electorate, well this is what happens when you twice elect a president into office on the principle of affirmative action.
Hat Tip: Bret Stephens, ‘The Age of American Impotence’, The Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2013