In his first year in office, President Obama has revealed some
terrible instincts on national security. It’s clear that, at a
gut level, he is not entirely comfortable with American hegemony.
Last June in Cairo he declared that “any world order that
elevates one nation or group of people over another will
inevitably fail.” Given that the current world order rests on the
military supremacy of the United States — the guarantor of peace
everywhere from Europe to Korea — that sentiment is a bit
alarming to hear coming out of an American president’s mouth.
In spite of those instincts, though, Obama has also shown
an ability to arrive at reasonable national security conclusions,
albeit slowly and reluctantly. The most obvious example is the
decision to embrace a personnel-intensive counterinsurgency
strategy in Afghanistan. The Bush administration conducted a
review in its final months that recommended such a strategy, and
the incoming administration declined to accept it, instead
demanding its own review. After General Stanley McChrystal
recommended a similar strategy in the summer of 2009, the
administration took months tweaking the specifics; former Vice
President Dick Cheney memorably slammed the administration for
“dithering” during this period. In the end, though, Obama more or
less got the answer right. He may be reluctant to exercise power,
but he is not unwilling to do so.
We saw this pattern play out faster after the attempted
terror attack on Christmas Day. Obama’s first instinct was not to
treat this as the act of war that it was, but rather to minimize
it. For several days he let subordinates handle all White House
statements about the incident; he himself went golfing. His
Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, airily declared
that “the system worked,” as if the job of her department is not
to prevent attacks but merely to respond to them efficiently.
When Obama finally did speak, he characterized bomber Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab as an “isolated extremist,” despite the evidence of
his connections to the Yemeni terrorist group Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula.
As the days went on and intelligence analysts pieced
together the events leading up to the incident, though, Obama’s
tune changed. “When a suspected terrorist is able to board a
plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in
a potentially disastrous way,” he said, implicitly repudiated
Napolitano. “This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” he
added. “It was a failure to integrate and understand the
intelligence that we already have.” Attempts to close this
security hole are in the works, and Obama has halted transfer of
prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to Yemen. Joint U.S.-British
counterterrorism operations have been stepped up in the wake of
the attack. Again, the administration arrived at a prudently
assertive policy despite its initial reticence.
ON IRAN, OBAMA HAS been characteristically reluctant to
speak assertively about American values. When the protests
following the stolen Iranian election started on June 13, the
White House took nearly a week to issue a weak statement that
“the world is watching.” This reflected a concern among many
foreign policy that the Iranian opposition would be ill-served by
full-throated American support. This concern was always
overstated, and any doubt that the protesters in the streets of
Iran would welcome the support of the United States should have
been lain to rest in November when they were filmed chanting
“Obama, are you with us or against us?”
After the late-December round of protests, Obama’s rhetoric
on Iran improved. He called for “the immediate release of all who
have been unjustly detained within Iran,” and more importantly
said that he is “confident that history will be on the side of
those who seek justice.”
It is this last point that should be emphasized further. At
the end of 2009 the Iranian regime let another artificial
deadline pass on arms-control negotiations. While some wonder if
opposition leaders would be any better than the current regime on
the nuclear issue, they could hardly be any worse. (Besides, an
Iran with nuclear weapons that isn’t controlled by fanatics would
be less problematic than one that is.) The success of the
opposition movement in Iran would be a huge boost to American
national security as well as to the security of the
region.
Tonight’s State of the Union address would be an ideal
opportunity for Obama to give the opposition a salutary
rhetorical boost. He should bring up Iran in the speech, and he
should build off his December statement and underscore that we
are rooting for the opposition and expecting them to succeed.
Natan Sharansky has described the “great brilliant moment” when
he and other dissidents in the Gulag heard that Ronald Reagan had
declared the Soviet Union an evil empire, and erupted into
cheers. Iranian dissidents deserve to feel the same kind of
support, and Americans deserve to know that Obama is willing,
however reluctantly, to assert our national interest.
