What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (52 page)

Interestingly, Obama made a strategically critical decision to strengthen the U.S. relationship with India, Pakistan’s great rival. An economic powerhouse and functioning democracy, India shares many of our geopolitical and economic interests. If we continue to nurture our relationship with India properly, it could serve as a valuable counterweight to growing Chinese power. If neglected by the United States, however, India could seek shelter in alliances with Beijing, Moscow, and elsewhere. Furthermore, India has a substantial Muslim population, borders Pakistan, and is dealing with the threat of Islamic terror, providing another area of bilateral cooperation. India’s regional dominance and shared values make it a valued partner for the United States—and the next president should work to develop further the Washington–New Delhi relationship.

Afghanistan presents another complicated challenge. As Kabul hosts U.S. troops, it’s also cozying up to our enemies in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. Our relationship needs extra care, as Afghanistan might easily slip back into the grip of extremism and terror, aimed at its own people as well as at the United States. Obama’s cynical policy of negotiating with the Taliban in order to expedite a full U.S. withdrawal is the ultimate in getting into bed with the devil. Soon enough, the devil devours you. There are no meaningful, peace-seeking negotiations to be had with entities for whom “peace” is achieved when you are either subjugated or dead. Whatever continued assistance we offer to the Karzai government should be made more conditional on anticorruption reform, political liberalization, and, as with Pakistan, the degree of helpfulness the government provides to us. If our commanders request it, the next president should try to maintain a significant enough presence to give our military efforts there more time to succeed. That may be a tough political sell, given the war’s length, budgetary constraints, and an inflamed region, but if the full Obama withdrawal is allowed to proceed, Afghanistan—like Iraq—may soon collapse into a hotbed of terror and oppression once again. And we may end up facing a far more dangerous and expensive threat.

Traditional allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey have also been engaged in duplicity, with Riyadh long supporting both terrorism and our efforts to fight it, and Ankara growing increasingly Islamist, cuddling up to Iran, and acting to turn Syria into a client state. The Saudis were particularly miffed over Obama’s rapid and dispassionate disposal of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a close friend of the Saudi regime. King Abdullah reportedly had at least one contentious telephone call with Obama over his handling of the Arab Spring there, and the relationship has been strained ever since. The Saudis are not saints, particularly in their support for terrorism and their leading role in OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) price extortion, but they have been critical players in terms of ensuring the global oil supply and serving as a counterweight to Iran. Tehran’s march toward a nuclear weapon and its escalating belligerence have created broad agreement among Israel, the Gulf states, and the West that Iran poses a dangerous threat that must be dealt with aggressively.

Meanwhile, we should also very carefully seek to encourage reform there and in neighboring Bahrain. Those regimes seem more airtight, but no government is completely immune from upheaval. As we saw in Egypt, if more moderate parties cannot organize, governments could face internal pressures both organic and stoked by outside powers such as Iran. We shouldn’t expect the home of Mecca and Medina to become a secular, tolerant, democratic lover of human rights. But we should try to influence Riyadh into taking on incremental changes to preempt a possible cracking of its brittle regime. If Saudi Arabia were destabilized, the region would be thrown into unprecedented turmoil and the global economy would be shaken to the core.

In Ankara, democratically elected Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdo
an has moved his country away from its previously secular and Western orientation and toward Islamism and America’s enemies. Europe is partly responsible, as it has rejected the Turks’ requests for membership in the European Union for more than a decade. If Europe says no to Turkey, and America says no to Turkey, then perhaps one day soon, it will be Iran or Russia eating a Turkey sandwich. The United States should be doing what it can in terms of diplomatic, political, and economic incentives to move Turkey back to a pro-Western stance. “Who lost Turkey?” might be as devastating a question as “Who lost Egypt?”

And in Tripoli, because of Obama and the Europeans’ failure to guide Libya’s revolution, the Islamists are running wild and may turn that nation into a base for al-Qaeda and other terrorists—a base much closer to Europe and the United States than was Afghanistan. It may not be too late to try to move Libya to a more pro-Western orientation. If Gadhafi were able to see the virtues of working with the United States, his successors may as well, but the United States must move fast to get in there before the militants become completely entrenched.

In dealing with terrorism more broadly, Team Obama has seen the virtues of using sophisticated drones to locate, identify, and take out terrorist suspects around the world—until it allowed the biggest state sponsor of terror, Iran, to get its hands on one. Once Tehran was assumed to have passed off the drone technology to Moscow, Beijing, and who knows who else, our stealth technology was rendered more vulnerable. Former vice president Dick Cheney reported that he heard that Obama was presented with three options to either recover or destroy the drone before the Iranians could take possession of it. Cheney said Obama rejected all three. Permitting Tehran to get the drone was the quintessential example of Obama redistributing American power to the world. Take one of our most high-tech defenses and give it to a sworn enemy? Why not? America’s greatness belongs to everyone!

Nuclear proliferation also remains a major problem, with the nuclear pipeline constantly flowing among Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Venezuela, among other rogue nations. The sensitive job of identifying and securing nuclear materials and enforcing international protocols against their transfer ought to be of the highest priority for the next administration.

Furthermore, Obama chose to kill high-level al-Qaeda terrorists rather than deal with the legal hassles of interrogation and detention, but he has opted to keep open the detainee facilities at both Guantánamo Bay and Bagram, Afghanistan. Capturing terrorist suspects and subjecting them to aggressive interrogation can yield valuable intelligence that disrupts terrorist attacks and saves American lives—as it has over the past ten years. In some cases, killing them may be the right choice; in others, capturing and interrogating them may be wiser. We desperately need a coherent legal framework and detainee policy going forward. We need something beyond Barack Obama and Eric Holder sitting a bunch of al-Qaeda terrorists in a circle and playing Duck, Duck, Goose to decide who goes where.

There are many other areas of the world that are crying out for greater U.S. attention, such as Latin America, which continues to be roiled by leftists, drug cartels, migration issues, and the growing influence of China there, and Africa, which continues to struggle with the AIDS epidemic, rampant corruption, grinding poverty, and spreading Islamism. Since we’re broke, we’re severely constrained in terms of what we can do in those regions, but we should use diplomatic and political levers to try to guide greater pro-democratic, pro-market outcomes that will eventually help to alleviate some of their seemingly intractable problems.

The United States also needs to put the United Nations back in its proper place. While the body has its uses, particularly with some refugee missions, it is a scandal-plagued viper’s pit of tyrant love and rampant anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. It’s also hyper-resistant to any kind of reform that would bring greater effectiveness, greater transparency, greater accountability, and less moral relativism. While the United States should remain in the UN, we should make clear that we will use the body when possible but we will not be used
by
it. International organizations will have our leadership and participation, but only when it serves our interests.

The days of a servile, apologetic, groveling, and weak America need to come to a close. And a new day of strong, vibrant, unapologetic, muscular American global leadership must dawn. In this new world, enemies will once again respect and fear us, allies will trust us, and those who want to challenge us will think twice. Good-bye, kook foreign policy; hello to the Happy Warrior approach.

Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack.

—Marshal Ferdinand Foch, France, 1914

In 1977, Margaret Thatcher, then the leader of the opposition in Great Britain, delivered a major speech to the Zurich Economic Society. By then, it was clear to almost everyone that under the “old” Labour government, Britain was weak, flailing, lost, crushed by deadening statism. The country was broke and held hostage by its powerful unions, which used paralyzing strikes to extort huge demands. Garbage piled up on every corner, courtesy of striking sanitation workers. Dead bodies rotted in the open air, thanks to striking grave-diggers. Inefficient state-run industries and suffocating regulations had turned the once-great empire into a socialist Third World backwater. The moment was ripe for a strong leader who refused to resign herself and her nation to such a fate. The moment was ripe for someone to reverse the economic stagnation caused by the corrosive effects of socialism and to tell the truth about what reversing national decline would require. The moment was ripe for an alternative based on pro-growth capitalism, individual freedom, and moral leadership. The moment was right for Margaret Thatcher, Happy Warrior.

“Where the state is too powerful,” she said, “efficiency suffers and morality is threatened. Britain in the last two or three years provides a case study of why collectivism will not work. It shows that ‘progressive’ theory was not progressive. On the contrary, it proved retrograde in practice. That is a lesson that democrats all over the world should heed.”

Thatcher didn’t shrink from making the brutally honest case against socialism: “In the end,” she had thundered, “the real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality.”

Ah, a leader who was unafraid to make the moral case for the free market! A leader who rejected declinism with every fiber of her being and who made it her life’s work to reverse it by cutting taxes, restraining spending, privatizing industries, deregulating, reining in inflation, subduing the unions, and flexing British military muscle. The dislocation was severe and the political opposition intense; at its lowest, her job approval sank to 23 percent. She was, however, ultimately vindicated by a long, sustained cycle of economic growth and national optimism. In the end, she had defied the critics, cowards, thugs, and defeatists to do what they had deemed impossible: she had restored Britain’s greatness.

In her Zurich speech, Thatcher also did something as critical as laying out a policy program. She hit a powerfully sunny note: “Yet I face the future with optimism. Our ills are creating their own antibodies. Just as success generates problems, so failure breeds the will to fight back and the body politic strives to restore itself.”

Thatcher struck a chord that made her and her political soul mate, President Reagan, extremely effective reformers. They believed in their nations. They believed in their people. And they believed in the regenerative dynamism of liberty. In times of crisis, we have always created our own antibodies for survival, mending, and a return to full health. This is why Obama will fail when it comes to his single biggest goal. He wanted to be a transformational president, but instead he has been merely a transitional one because he always refused to take into account the larger view of how his short-term disruptions to the American dream would be judged by history once they’d been completely undone in the ensuing years, which is almost a certainty.

The great American comeback begins with each of us. It’s up to us to make the “what the @$%&! just happened?” moment an anomaly in American history, a brief aberration that did a lot of damage but is fixable with the right leadership and policies. The circumstances of today’s American crisis are different from those faced by Reagan and Thatcher, but the basic challenge is largely the same: to reverse corrosive leftism and its attendant decline. We need to take this “what the @$%&! just happened” moment and turn it into a question on
Jeopardy!
under the category “Weird American Acid Trips.”

But we’ve got to move fast. Time is not on our side as the tentacles of kookdom wrap themselves around our governing institutions, private sector, and every other aspect of our lives. After an unmistakable electoral repudiation of Obama, his leftist agenda, and those who pushed it, the next key to unleashing America is to get the rest of us to uproot the toxic and ravenous nanny state, replace it with the limited government, economically free model, and do the hard work of rallying the public to the comeback. None of this will be easy, and success is not guaranteed. The problems are immense, the entitlement culture is entrenched, and the kooks will not go down without a NatGeo Serengeti-style fight. But America still possesses huge strengths economically, politically, militarily, culturally, and constitutionally.