Barack
Obama’s cancellation of his Russian visit is the normal sort of
diplomat payback for insult and injury — in this case the asylum offered
Edward Snowden in the face of administration pleas to send him home for
punishment. But with Obama, as with everything with Obama, the
about-face invokes irony, hypocrisy, and paradox, because it is just the
sort of normal Neanderthal tit-for-tat that was not supposed to happen
under an Obama pathbreaking foreign policy.
He entered office chastising the Bush administration for its failure
to talk with the Iranians and Syrians. The subtext was that Bush lacked
both his own charm and insight into human character that together would
produce results that Texan right-wingers stuck in Cold War prisms could
hardly appreciate.
The Snowden putdown proved the proverbial icing on the cake, given
that the Obama administration had always combined the worst of both
diplomatic worlds with Putin, as it so often does with its empty
redlines and deadlines: loud sermonizing without commensurate toughness.
Dropping the Eastern Europeans on missile defense, negotiating with
the Russians on reducing strategic arms without much concern for our
obligations to our non-nuclear allies that quite easily could become
nuclear without our huge umbrella, the open-mic assurances of
post-election flexibility, or pleading with the Russians to be
reasonable on Iran and Syria was juxtaposed with loud lectures to the
Putin authoritarians on human rights, tolerance of dissent, and proper
behavior at the U.N.
Putin — earlier than other leaders — grasped that the U.S. was back
to a utopian Jimmy Carter mode. And so, not content in finding
advantage, he also seeks fun in publicly humiliating the U.S. He was
always an unapologetic Russian nationalist, stung by the loss of
prestige after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but reenergized by huge
oil revenues. His stock and trade has always been pointing out Western
moral hypocrisies — from supporting cruel anti-democratic Islamists to
distorting U.N. resolutions on no-fly zones and humanitarian aid in
Libya.
In that sense, he is the perfect antithesis to Obama. The
sanctimonious Al-Arabiya interview, the Cairo Speech, and the missionary
declarations on Libya all presupposed that Obama alone was sensitive to
diverse cultures and had both the charisma and moxie to win over those
who were previously alienated due to less-sophisticated American
leaders.
The result is not just chaos in the Middle East — an unbound Iran,
the Syrian quagmire, the Somalization of Libya, Benghazi, the closing of
an unprecedented number of embassies, the Egyptian flip-flop-flips,
another doomed Israeli-Palestinian initiative — but a global sense that
most countries either politely tune Obama’s soaring rhetoric out, or
enjoy finding ways to expose the lack of commensurate concrete
consequences.
Putin knows that and positions himself as the sort of realist that
mocks Obama’s pretensions. And while most abroad accept that he is a
thug, they nevertheless seem to enjoy watching Putin, in spider-and-fly
fashion, deflate our moral pretenses.
In light of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Communist
insurgencies in Central America, the Iranian revolution and the taking
of hostages in Tehran, and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, Jimmy Carter
committed to upping the defense budget, dropped his lectures on
inordinate fears of communism, issued the “Carter Doctrine,” and gave up
on coaxing Khomeini.
But for a variety of reasons, Obama is no Carter, and I doubt he will make such eleventh-hour adjustments.
