DAN HENNINGER:Bergdahl, Obama and the Tank Man
http://online.wsj.com/articles/daniel-henninger-bergdahl-obama-and-the-tank-man-1401924373#
Obama’s foreign policy is a five-year fuzzball of good intentions.
Barack Obama will be remembered as a president who walked in his own spotlight. Whatever else, he’s been on view all the time. This week it’s the Barack Obama-Bowe Bergdahl deal.
Why did “Obama” do it? Let us count the conjectures overflowing the World Wide Web. Because he felt Bowe was in failing health. No, because he wants to close Guantanamo. No (and sign me onto this one), because he wants to do a peace negotiation with the Taliban. Just as he is doing a peace deal with Iran’s mullahs, just as he is doing a peace deal with the new PLO-Hamas “unity” government.
With the Obama presidency, nothing’s ever close to done. Benghazi sits as one of life’s mysteries. We don’t know what was going on with the IRS audits. ObamaCare may be a real law, but it has more potholes than the streets of New York.
It is too bad Barack Obama can’t meet the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square. He would learn that sometimes in the affairs of the world, there comes a time to say, enough. Stop.
This Thursday is the 25th anniversary of the Tank Man’s solitary protest. On June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese army crushed the students’ democracy rebellion in Tiananmen Square, with hundreds dead, a man in a white shirt walked in front of the army’s tanks, driving down a street near the square. For a while, he made the tanks stop.
To this day, no one knows who the brave Tank Man was. But the whole world watched on global television as he stood down the tank commander. When the tanks tried to go around him, he moved in front of them. Eventually, two people came from the crowd and led him away. He was never seen again.
There are two other anniversaries this week, and both evoke the same idea of taking an unmistakable political stand.
Friday is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, when 160,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy. A year later, the U.S.-led Allies made the Nazi army stop.
Thursday is also the 10th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s death. It was Reagan’s decision, early in his presidency, to make the Cold War stop by winning it. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.
Last week at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, President Obama gave a speech describing his view of the U.S. role in the world. Any close reading of this speech would fail to identify a “situation,” as we say today about places such as Ukraine, that would cause Mr. Obama to say simply: This must be stopped.
The president and his supporters would argue, as he has, that the world today is different than the one that existed in 1944 or 1989. An alternative exists, Mr. Obama said at West Point, other than endless war and militarism or doing nothing.
We straw men whom Mr. Obama set up and knocked down repeatedly in his Military Academy apologia would note that in the past five years the space between all or nothing has filled with Russia’s border busting, Iran’s nuclear-bomb project, Syria’s sarin gas, China’s disruptions of its neighbors, North Korea’s threats against South Korea and Japan, Venezuela’s Tiananmen-like crackdown of its democracy protesters, and al Qaeda subdividing into multiple cells from Asia to Africa.
In keeping with the postmodern idea that nothing is ever settled, the Obama foreign-policy shop would reply that their middle way of sticking a thumb—or the U.N.’s thumbs—into the world’s bursting dams fits the current American mood of post-Iraq and Afghanistan fatigue. Past some point, those fatigue metrics reflect a discounting of American leadership going forward, not what happened 10 years ago.
All of this, however, ducks the one big question asked of any modern president’s foreign policy: What, exactly, do you guys stand for? What, when you’ve left the building, will the United States represent?
After more than five years of Obama foreign policy, what we’ve got is a huge fuzzball of good intentions. It doesn’t stand for anything—not a strategy, not a set of identifiable ideas, no real doctrine and not much to show for whatever it is.
Barack Obama in the world resembles Casper the Friendly Ghost—with the U.S. role fading in and out of view as is his wont. Hillary Clinton flew a million miles as Secretary of State with no evident concept of what she was doing or why. John Kerry endlessly slips in and out of capitals, talking. This, they say, is “smart power.”
Smart power just sprung a volunteer POW named Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five stone-killer Taliban. No one in the Obama White House, including as always Susan Rice, can give an adequate explanation for what this was all about. Only the president knows. That may work for him. But for everyone else in an unsettled world, not so well.
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