A Nation Like No Other (25 page)

Six days later, after the protests had spiraled into a mass movement and the regime's police forces had begun brutally cracking down, Obama responded by expressing his “concern” at the violence. This meek condemnation was weakened further when Obama derided the protestors by claiming the difference between Ahmadinejad's policies and those of the opposition candidate who actually won the elections, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, “may not be as great as advertised.”
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Obama further explained he did not want to be seen as “meddling” in the elections—a feeble justification for breaking American tradition and refusing to support peaceful protestors as they were beaten and shot in the streets by police-state thugs.

Obama's muted reaction to the Iranian protests stemmed from his naïve goal of “engaging” Iran's mad mullahs in a “dialogue”; an administration official admitted as much to the
New Yorker
, saying, “The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters.”
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And the administration surely did a good job of that—no one could have mistaken the president for siding with the oppressed Iranian protestors against their despotic rulers.

Obama took a similar approach in his dealings with Russia—and achieved a similar outcome. Believing that tensions with Russia stemmed from our previous administration's supposed intransigence, Obama officials took office pledging to “reset” U.S.-Russia relations. To demonstrate to the world America's new approach, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton travelled to Geneva and presented the Russian foreign minister with a hokey reset button that was misspelled in the Russian language.

The chief accomplishment Obama touts for his Russia policy is the “New START” treaty on nuclear arms controls. However, as Charles Krauthammer noted, the treaty significantly damages America's national security by impeding our development of missile defense systems, despite Obama's claims to the contrary.
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Russia has pocketed this concession and demanded more, just as it did with Obama's decision to dramatically scale back our missile defense plans for Eastern Europe—a move that keeps our Czech and Polish allies vulnerable to Russian bullying. In the post-Cold War world, why the president suddenly views Russia's nuclear arsenal as a vital threat is anyone's guess. Meanwhile, Iran continues its furious quest to acquire nuclear weapons, having proven impervious to Obama's repeated pleas for “dialogue.”

Finally, there is no better example of Obama's willful determination to downsize America's global influence than his actions in Libya. Having undertaken a humanitarian mission to prevent the massacre of Libyan rebels by their dictator, Muammar Kaddafi, the president stipulated from the beginning that after conducting some initial airstrikes, the United States would play a “supporting” role in the operation. And Obama has kept his word, turning most responsibility for the campaign over to NATO, particularly Britain and France.

This represents a fundamental reorientation of power relations both within NATO and in the world at large. America has always exercised firm leadership of NATO, but that era is apparently over—at America's own behest. Elevating the tool of multilateralism into an end in itself, the Obama administration categorically rejects the very idea of American dominance. The administration's urge to shirk responsibility and accountability for the Libyan operation is clear; in fact, one U.S. official was quite explicit about it in his comments on Libya to the
New York Times
: “‘We didn't want to get sucked into an operation with uncertainty at the end,' the senior administration official said. ‘In some ways, how it turns out is not on our shoulders.'”
¹⁶

The predictable result of the abdication of American leadership has been confusion, tension with our allies, and thus far, failure in the Libyan campaign. NATO members—as well as Obama's own officials—have not even been able to agree on what would constitute victory. The
New York Times
reported on the alliance's disarray:

The French foreign minister claimed the Libyan campaign would last days or weeks but not months.
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However, lacking a well-defined strategy or even clear objectives, the operation, at the time of this writing, is well into its second month—with no end in sight. It is astonishing to think that after protecting Western Europe from Communism for forty years, and acting as the linchpin of most of the continent's security for another ten years, NATO's credibility is being severely damaged by an African dictator who no longer fully controls his own country.

As previously stated, we pay a price for America's leadership in the world—but there is also a price to pay for withdrawing from it. The entire world is watching as a void develops that American power used
to fill. Our enemies are adept at exploiting weakness, and they are already maneuvering to take advantage of America's new reluctance to “meddle” in world affairs.

America is confronted by growing threats from radical Islamism. As we remain engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, as conditions in Yemen, Bahrain, and Pakistan become more precarious by the day, and as Iran races to develop nuclear weapons, one might be tempted to conclude President Obama lacks any comprehensive strategy for addressing radical Islamism and other threats facing the United States. However, it has recently come to light that the president does, in fact, take a principled approach to leadership.

In the
New Yorker
, an Obama advisor characterized the principle behind the president's actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” The magazine explained, based on interviews with a wide range of current and former Obama administration officials, that this is “a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.”
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This “definition of leadership”—the closest thing we have to an Obama Doctrine—not only violates American Exceptionalism, it is the precise antithesis of American Exceptionalism. This notion—that America should acknowledge its “decline” and abdicate its global leadership at the behest of those who supposedly “revile” us—is a self-fulfilling prescription for our future as a weaker, less respected, and ultimately less safe country.

The world today would be a far different place if not for America's constant, confident push for freedom over the last century. In evaluating the usefulness of American leadership, President Obama should ask the opinion of a survivor of East European Communism, or a survivor of Imperial Japan's depredations throughout Asia, or a survivor of Nazi Germany's horrific atrocities. He should ask Taiwanese or Korean citizens who depend on America to protect their nations from revanchist Communists, or Indonesian or Japanese citizens who benefited from American
aid in recovering from a tsunami. Ask them if America is a force for good—and whether the world would be better off if the United States were a nation like any other.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

T
he American economy today is in dire straits. The real unemployment rate—which includes those who have stopped looking for work—is around 15 percent. Food, gasoline, and healthcare prices are rising fast. Americans are working longer hours, yet have less disposable income. We remain reliant on unstable, sometimes hostile foreign countries for much of our energy. For the first time since World War II, we face real economic competitors, in China and India. And most threatening to our future, the federal government budget deficit is over $1 trillion a year, pushing our national debt to an astonishing $14 trillion.

Unsurprisingly, Americans feel anxious about our future. A March 2011 Rasmussen poll showed that by a margin of 48 to 34, Americans believe our country's best days are behind us, and just 22 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction. This pessimism was evident at a town hall event with President Obama in
September 2010, when a woman who voted for Obama told him, “My husband and I … thought we were well beyond the hot dogs and beans era of our lives, but … that might be where we're headed again, and, quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly. Is this my new reality?”
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Video of the confrontation went viral on the Internet, because it captured Americans' current fear and frustration. America's traditional can-do optimism, in which every generation is expected to have a better life than the last, has been replaced by a growing concern that our current problems are not, in fact, a temporary bump in the road, but instead, a preview of the tough decades ahead.

The deteriorating economy is, in many ways, a symptom of the collapse of the big-government welfare state. Our current governing model is simply proving too slow, too expensive, and too destructive of the core habits of success that have made America exceptional for the past 400 years.

The election of a young, charismatic, liberal president to tackle our economic crisis was seen by our elites as heralding the rebirth of big-government liberalism in America, and as the death-knell of small-government conservatism. “We are all socialists now” blared one typical headline from
Newsweek
. “Whether we like it or not,” wrote the authors, “the numbers clearly suggest that we are headed in a more European direction.”
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Instead, Obama's spasm of big-government intervention—including the extravagant and counter-productive stimulus, the unpopular passage of ObamaCare, and the acceleration of the government debt crisis—vividly demonstrated to the country not a renaissance of Big Government, but its limitations. America is now reassessing what government can and cannot do against the Left's false assurances that government is always the solution.

To understand just how fundamentally the big-government welfare state has failed, it is worthwhile to review how it emerged and why.
During the Progressive era of 1890 to 1916, in reaction to the rapid industrialization of the Gilded Age, the belief spread that America needed the federal government to substantially regulate the private economy. The government approved anti-trust laws and formed agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration to protect consumers from corporate dishonesty and abuse. The Progressives also tried to professionalize the government workforce, both to combat corruption and to introduce scientific planning and new efficiencies to government.

Initially, the welfare state was deemed necessary in order to adapt to new economic realities. Capitalism in the industrial age could produce enormous wealth, Progressives argued, but it also left people at risk of poverty and exploitation. The promise of the big-government welfare state was that government would curb the worst excesses of capitalism through strict regulation of the private sector while providing a system of social insurance to meet everyone's basic needs.

This welfare state, they promised, would be run impartially and scientifically by a professional and competent bureaucracy. Furthermore, the common contribution to the social safety net would provide a sense of community and shared moral purpose among the American people to care for the health and well-being of their neighbors.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the government assumed responsibility for providing a basic level of economic security for the American people. The Social Security Administration was created to solve the problem of senior poverty, and unemployment insurance was introduced as part of the new safety net. The Great Society programs of the 1960s saw the government further expand its role in reducing poverty with the advent of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and many other programs. As the number of these welfare and social insurance programs grew, the government needed an ever expanding bureaucracy to administer them, and more and more regulations to guide them. The whole system grew into the big-government welfare state we have today.