Obama’s Globe: A President’s Abandonment of U.S. Allies Around
the World
By Bruce
Herschensohn
(Beaufort Books, 182
pages, $24.95)
Bruce Herschensohn is a man with a clear-eyed view of how
enemies and friends of the United States react to our government’s
rhetoric and actions (or inactions). He is a man whose wise foreign
policy analysis is based on years of thinking (and writing) about
history and international relations. He is a man who understands
the value of “treating the U.S.A.’s friends as friends and
adversaries as adversaries.”
In other words, Bruce Herschensohn does not work for the Obama
administration.
In his new book,
Obama’s Globe, Mr. Herschensohn, whose résumé includes
achievements in everything from politics and policy to film making
to book authorship (largely on
foreign affairs), explains how President Obama’s “abandonment
of U.S. allies around the world” is reducing America’s influence
and harming our national security.
Obama’s Globe, which was published a mere seven weeks
ago and less than a month before the recent wave of attacks against
Americans across the Muslim world, begins with Herschensohn laying
out the current global strategic situation, particularly that the
U.S. is at war against Islamic terrorism — whether President Obama
likes it or not and even if his administration has banned the use
of such terms by our diplomats and federal bureaucrats.
The book explains how Barack Obama’s obvious ignorance of the
lessons of history, such as that “wars are not ended. Wars
are won or lost,” underlies this president’s
too-consistent-to-be-accidental record of terrible foreign policy
decisions. Terrible, at least, if one believes the goal of foreign
policy should be to advance American interests, power, and
security.
As Mr. Herschensohn notes dryly, “the greatest accomplishment of
the Jimmy Carter Presidency was that he provided forthcoming
Presidents with the evidence of what tremendous damage could be
done by choosing to abandon the nation’s friends.” Barack Obama
must have been out with his
Choom Gang the day they taught this lesson, as he has
mistreated allies and cozied up to competitors and enemies as
aggressively as Carter did with, not surprisingly to those who
learn the lessons of history, terrible results across the
globe.
After setting the stage by describing today’s dangerous world,
Obama’s Globe takes readers around the planet, explaining
how, time after time, this administration has made our world that
much more dangerous.
The voyage takes us to England, the Czech Republic, and Poland,
then across North Africa, into Iran and Syria, to neighboring
Israel, east to Afghanistan and Pakistan, then into China and North
Korea before returning to our own continent and visiting Honduras
and Canada.
In each and every case, the president has refused to support —
or proactively betrayed — our allies. At the same time, this
administration has engaged in a foreign policy based on “softness
and smartness” which our adversaries perceive clearly and
accurately as weakness, while the needs of our position in the
world, our relationships with friends and enemies alike, scream out
for a realistic and strong approach. Unfortunately, Barack Obama
and Hillary Clinton seem congenitally incapable of considering,
much less implementing, a strategy based on another clear lesson of
history: peace through strength.
When it comes to dealing with tyrants, Herschensohn says that
“‘peace talks’ are not worthwhile.” In the specific example of the
Taliban in Afghanistan, with whom the Obama administration has been
having futile discussions, Obama’s Globe asks the
question: “What should be done regarding the Taliban if not
negotiate?” The answer is short and precise: “Win.” It is a point
made repeatedly in the book: American foreign policy must
be about winning, not about feeling good or being liked.
In Pakistan, where the national intelligence service, the ISI,
has long-standing ties to radical Islamists including the Taliban,
Herschensohn suggests that unless the ISI and the Pakistani
government “become true partners against both al-Qaeda and the
Taliban, the United States should propose a Mutual Defense Treaty
with India.” Few things would frighten Pakistan — and perhaps
China — more.
In case it wasn’t already clear, Mr. Herschensohn’s is nobody’s
dove. He opposes all cuts in the defense budget except those asked
for by the Department of Defense. As he put it in a brief interview
for this article, “Defense is not a Jobs Bill.” He also
aggressively opposes the atrophy of our nation’s space exploration
program, which he describes as “reversing Kennedy’s quest of space
supremacy.”
So it is not surprising that while he compliments President
Obama “for advocating and ordering U.S. forces to take part in the
‘No Fly Zone’ and air strikes over Libya,” he is scathing in his
criticism of Obama’s leading from behind, noting that no other
American president would have agreed to “become a part of
a coalition of nations rather than being the leader of the
coalition…”
While this view is widely held in conservative circles, it is
increasingly common among Republicans, particularly in the Ron Paul
wing of the party, to question the use of American military power
around the world. Bruce Herschensohn has no such questions,
wondering aloud “what the world would have been like if the U.S.
hadn’t entered World War II and the Cold War and Kuwait and Bosnia
and Kosovo and how the world will likely look if the U.S. chooses
to reject that role. But better to imagine it than have the next
generation live it.”
One of Mr. Herschensohn’s boldest exhortations, and one which
differs from every senior member of Congress and every presidential
administration in recent memory, is how to deal with the
Israeli-Palestinian situation.
After explaining the military history of modern Israel,
Herschensohn exposes the lie of “the 1967 lines,” noting that in
1967 the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were the territory of Egypt
and Jordan. Thus going back to those lines would not mean the
creation of a Palestinian state — which has never existed. While
Herschensohn vehemently opposes forcing Israel to give back
territory won in wars started by the Arabs, he does agree with his
own logical conclusion, telling the Spectator “I believe
in a One State Solution called Israel.”
From the so-called “Right of Return” to Barack Obama’s statement
that the Palestinians should have “a sovereign and contiguous
state,” every aspect of the “peace process” of the last few decades
and particularly the current president’s thinking (not that he
seems to be thinking about it very much) seem designed to assist
the Arabs’ long-term goal of the elimination of Israel. While a
one-state solution may seem unrealistically far afield of current
thinking both inside and outside the U.S., Bruce Herschensohn’s
arguments are thought-provoking and a valuable contribution to a
situation that has been hampered by stultified and stagnant
thinking, and further hampered by Barack Obama’s destruction of
another special relationship.
While the examples noted in this review are all based in or near
the Middle East, the point is not a geographical analysis as much
as emphasizing the Obama administration’s pattern of mistreating
friends and coddling adversaries. In that same vein, Herschensohn
has numerous examples of abysmal foreign policy behavior by the
Obama administration closer to home, not least being the
underreported support of Obama for a leftist president of Honduras
who wanted to remain in office despite that nation’s constitution’s
term limits provisions. In doing so, Obama opposed Honduras’
supreme court and “the chief elements of democracy in Honduras.
Opposing [the rule of law in Honduras] was the government of
Castro’s Cuba, the Chavez government of Venezuela, and the Obama
administration of the United States of America.”
Given the recent events across the Muslim world, Bruce
Herschensohn’s book was unfortunately, but not unexpectedly,
prescient. Abandoning allies and projecting weakness has emboldened
our competitors and enemies from Egypt to Iran to Russia to North
Korea.
In a mere 175 pages of eminently readable prose, Bruce
Herschensohn calmly makes a devastating case against the foreign
policy of President Barack Hussein Obama and, more importantly,
offers readers a foundation on which they can build their own
ability to assess American international relations going forward.
It is thus a book that, despite its title, is worth reading whether
or not Barack Obama wins re-election in November, something our
allies probably fear as much as Mitt Romney does.
As we’ve watched UN Ambassador Susan Rice tour
the Sunday shows with obvious ignorance or lies, as we see the
current administration sell our national security down the river
(who can forget Obama telling Russian President — now Prime
Minister — Dmitri Medvedev that he will have more “flexibility” to
cave in to Russian wishes regarding missile defense if Obama wins
his “last election”?), I can only nod my head in appreciative
agreement with what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said about Bruce
Herschensohn: “If all Americans were like you, America certainly
would not perish.”
But then, Barack Obama probably thinks Solzhenitsyn is the
captain of the Russian national hockey team…
