Obama's Lame Diplomacy

Since the story is being ignored, the New York Times deserves great credit for highlighting it.

Yesterday the Times published a fascinating article by Michael Gordon about how the Obama administration failed in its efforts to negotiate an agreement with Iraq about the continued presence of American troops in the country.

The American public is tired of wars and it is tired of Iraq. And, it is difficult to focus on the complexities of a diplomatic negotiation when the airwaves are filled with shameless demagoguery.

Many citizens do not know enough about negotiation to follow the intricacies and subtleties of the Obama administration’s lame diplomacy.

Such is reality.

If, however, you would like to read an excellent account of how a bunch of rank amateurs botched a diplomatic negotiation, Gordon lays it out in painful detail.

Herewith Gordon summarizes a major foreign policy failure:

Mr. Obama has pointed to the American troop withdrawal last year as proof that he has fulfilled his promise to end the Iraq war. Winding down a conflict, however, entails far more than extracting troops.

In the case of Iraq, the American goal has been to leave a stable and representative government, avoid a power vacuum that neighboring states and terrorists could exploit and maintain sufficient influence so that Iraq would be a partner or, at a minimum, not an opponent in the Middle East.

But the Obama administration has fallen frustratingly short of some of those objectives.

The attempt by Mr. Obama and his senior aides to fashion an extraordinary power-sharing arrangement between Mr. Maliki and Mr. Allawi never materialized. Neither did an agreement that would have kept a small American force in Iraq to train the Iraqi military and patrol the country’s skies. A plan to use American civilians to train the Iraqi police has been severely cut back. The result is an Iraq that is less stable domestically and less reliable internationally than the United States had envisioned.

Looking Into the World's Future

Futurism has gotten something of a bad name. Serious thinkers think about the past more than the future. It’s so much more real.

You cannot look foolish for wrongly predicting the past.

In his great book The Black Swan Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued that we are so convinced that the past is bound to repeat itself—return of the repressed, eternal recurrence of the same and such—that we fail to prepare ourselves for the future.

And yet, the most important and decisive historical events are precisely those that we did not imagine. The events that are most likely to define our lives are the most improbable.

Of course, the terrorist attack of 9/11/01 is a black swan event. Everyone knew that Islamic terrorists were a threat to aviation. No one imagined that they would fly hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center.

We think realistically; we prepare for what is likely to happen. And then, we get blind-sided by catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina.

Of course, if you foresee a looming catastrophe and prepare for it, it is less likely to occur or, if it occurs, to be decisive.

Predicting the future is dangerous for your self-esteem. You will start sounding like a crackpot who gazes into crystal balls.

And yet, a prediction is like a scientific hypothesis. It will be proved or disproved by events.

Apparently, people who value their professional reputations would rather not subject themselves to reality checks.

On the other side of the argument, policy makers always prepare for future contingencies. Investors envision a future in which their investments will be profitable. Traders who buy and sell futures contracts—paying today for a commodity that will be delivered in the future—are focused on the future.

Today, Bret Stephens lays out a series of possible future events that could undermine the world order.

Stephens is telling us that the global order, the new world order, if you wish, can very easily become undone. He is not prophesying as much as he is recommending that we prepare ourselves for what might be ahead.

He is not quite saying how and why any of this might come about, but the subtext of his article is that this is the way the world might look under more failed leadership by Barack Obama.

The great unraveling might begin in the Middle East; it might begin in China or in Southern Europe; it might begin at the ballot box on November 6.

Stephens is being sane and sensible. We know, or at least we think we know, the dangers posed by a nuclear Iran. We should be well aware of the danger posed by the disintegration of the European Union.

Today, many people believe that the problems with Iran and Greece can be controlled. Some people are not quite so optimistic.

And then there is the Arab Spring. Most people have come to terms with the new reality in North Africa.

Stephens writes:

In a kind of nightmare fulfillment of George W. Bush’s freedom agenda, millions of Muslims are consenting to leaders who have long looked askance at the traditions and types of freedoms familiar to the West: freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, a tolerance for intellectual provocation and dissent.

“It is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart’s desire in freedom,” says Leo Naphta, the totalitarian avatar in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. “Its deepest desire is to obey.” In today’s Middle East, Naphta’s dismal proposition is being vindicated.

If those calamities are not sufficiently frightening, Stephens invites us to contemplate another nightmare scenario: the re-election of Barack Obama.

Here’s how he sees the day after an Obama victory:

On Wednesday, November 7, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by more than 1,600 points, forcing an automatic shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange. By the end of the month, the Dow had lost 30 percent of its value. The Federal Reserve had little to offer: Its third round of quantitative easing had done nothing to stimulate the economy. Hiring freezes became the order of the day. The unemployment rate moved above 9 percent. Unchecked federal spending and a weaker economy also appeared to guarantee a debt-to-GDP ratio well above the 100 percent mark. The economic shockwaves—instantly dubbed the Second Great Recession—were felt throughout the world, but especially in countries with export-dependent economies: Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China.

Perhaps America will become sufficiently futuristic to foresee the consequences of an Obama victory in time. Perhaps it will not.

Stephens remains optimistic about America. He channels Walter Russell Mead’s thoughts about America’s strengths and virtues:

Walter Russell Mead has observed that the United States continues to hold most of the good geopolitical cards—it’s just forgotten how to play them. Those cards include North America’s fracking revolution in oil and natural gas, which over time will mitigate (though not eliminate) the geopolitical risks in the energy markets and create new opportunities for domestic manufacturing and industry. They include America’s continuing appeal to hearts and minds in much of the world, including the East Asian periphery that China is so keen to bring within its sphere. They include the inherent weakness of all America’s principal geopolitical competitors, not only Iran and China but also Russia and the European Union. They include the natural resilience of the U.S. economy and the continuing innovative nature of our people, whose products others may imitate but whose soul, as it were, remains distinctively American. They include a political culture that, thanks to our federalist structure, is immensely varied and experiment-minded. They include popular attitudes toward politics that are individualistic to the core and disdain conformity and taboo.

We’re holding all the cards. We have not been playing them.

It would be more accurate to say that Barack Obama does not want to play them or does not know how to play them. He might think he is managing American decline, but the consequences of his failure will reverberate throughout the world, in ways foreseen and unforeseen.

The Offensive President Morsi

Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi has just launched a new diplomatic offensive in an interview he granted the New York Times.

Emphasis on the “offensive.”

For a man whose nation is sorely dependent on the largesse of the American taxpayer Morsi shows very little gratitude or respect.

He does not reach out a hand of friendship. He does not thank the American people. He says he wants to redefine the relationship between Egypt and America.

Actually he wants to dictate new terms.

Morsi has the gall to suggest that the United States must “fundamentally change” its approach to the Arab world by showing more respect for its values. In that way American can tamp down the Muslim violence that has been sweeping the world.

One must point out that the more Obama and Clinton prostrate themselves before Muslim values the more Muslims commit acts of violence.

But then, which values might he be talking about? The anti-Semitism, the persecution of Christians and gays, the oppression of women, the promotion of female genital mutilation, the stonings of adulterers, the hatred of free expression …..

We have been led to believe that Barack Obama gave Morsi quite a tongue lashing after Morsi allowed a bunch of Islamist fanatics to breach the American Embassy in Cairo and burn the American flag.

Obviously it’s a lie. A leader who was subjected to tough talk does not talk down to the American president. If Morsi is now publicly dictating terms to Obama, that can only mean that our president's apologetic subservience has led Morsi to conclude that he can dictate terms to the United States. He also must have been led to believe that he pay no price for condescending to America.

Morsi has concluded that he has a friend, and perhaps more than one, in the Obama White House.

Disgraceful….

The Trouble With Neuroscience

No one is against neuroscience. Certainly, not I.

Yet, the masters of neuroscience, accompanied by their journalistic promoters have gotten into the business of pretending that neuroscience can explain just about anything.

Neuroscience, we are told, solves the mysteries of the human mind. It explains human behavior and human motivation.

Since they tend not to believe in rational thought, neuroscientists tend systematically to obscure the difference between the mind and the brain.

Grant that an area of your brain lights up when you are thinking about a certain idea. Would you claim that the colored blip is an idea?

Would you like to argue that ideas cease to exist when no one is thinking them? If the process of photosynthesis obeys a set of rules, do you think that it stops when no one is thinking them?

Neuroscientists who claim that their science can tell us what we should and should not do need to reread David Hume’s argument that science tells us what is while ethics tells us what we should do.

You cannot use science to make or defend moral judgments.

Science can tell you what happens when you shoot a bullet into a wall. Science can also tell you what happens when you shoot a bullet into a human being. It does NOT tell you whether you should or should not do the one or the other.

If, for example, neuroscience could show that members of one political party are more fearful or more aggressive than members of another, nothing in neuroscience tells us whether fearful or aggressive is better or worse given the political circumstances.

Neuroscience does not tell us which set of policies will produce prosperity and which set will produce poverty.

Science will tell us what happens when people are well-fed. It will tell us what happens when people starve. We all have clear opinions about which is better and which is worse, but these are not based on science.

There is a chasm between science and ethics, one that popular neuroscience has been more than happy to ignore.

In a recent essay Stephen Poole sets out to debunk the claims for neuroscience… all the while showing a health appreciation for what it can do.

Poole begins:

An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.

Popular books about neuroscience are a business. They have found a market niche. They pretend that their science has solved the great philosophical problems.

For people who do not believe in any higher power they provide something like a foundation for their beliefs.

Poole continues:

The true function of such books, of course, is to free readers from the responsibility of thinking for themselves. This is made eerily explicit in the psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, published last March, which claims to show that “moral knowledge” is best obtained through “intuition” (arising from unconscious brain processing) rather than by explicit reasoning. “Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason,” Haidt enthuses, in a perverse manifesto for autolobotomy. I made an Olympian effort to take his advice seriously, and found myself rejecting the reasoning of his entire book.

Ideas wrapped in neuroscience often have a hidden agenda.

In some cases, these books offer advice that is sane and sensible. In others, they have a darker purpose, like talking you out of your ability to reason.

Does Haidt mean that you should follow your gut, act irrationally and not even bother to try to exercise any self-control?

Surely, this is implied in his call for an “autolobotomy.”

Other important books in neuroscience declare in stentorian tones, as though they were imparting great truths, that you have no free will.

Neuroscientists claim to have proved that free will does not exist, and that our minds are really being controlled by a more primal, more reptilian part of the brain. They may or may not know it, but they are trying to soften us up.

It is easier to take away someone’s freedom when you convince him that he doesn’t have any.

What Do Women Really Want?

A man who wants to know what women want has one surefire way to find out. Ask….

If Freud had trusted women, if he had respected their judgment and been willing to take them at their word he would not have had to torment himself about the mystery of women’s desire.

In a recent survey young mothers were asked what they really, really want. The answer: they want to stay at home with their children. They would rather not work outside of their homes. 

Meghan Casserly reports:

At a moment in history when the American conversation seems to be obsessed with bringing attention to women in the workplace (check out “The End of Men,” or Google “gender paygap” for a primer), it seems a remarkable chasm between what we’d like to see (more women in the corporate ranks) and what we’d like for ourselves (getting out of Dodge). But it’s true: according to our survey, 84% of working women told ForbesWoman and TheBump that staying home to raise children is a financial luxury they aspire to.

What’s more, more than one in three resent their partner for not earning enough to make that dream a reality.

If this is true, then what are we to make of the feminist siren song that tells women that they cannot be happy and fulfilled unless they have a great career?

Are feminists lying to women about themselves?

Are feminists systematically disrespecting women’s desires and doing everything in their power to ensure that those desires are frustrated?

Feminism pretends to defend the best interests of women. In some cases it has enjoyed notable success in defending women’s political rights.

And yet, feminism has another uglier side, one that is not about politics but about the way a woman chooses to live her life. A radical ideology seeking a major cultural transformation, feminism wants women to conform to its idea of what they should want.

The national conversation about women in the workplace is a ruse. It shows how feminism manipulates women’s minds to make them believe that if they are not sacrificing their wishes for feminism’s, they are betraying that cause.

Feminism does not respect women; it does not respect women’s wishes; it does not respect women’s choices.

Working mothers who cannot afford to stay at home with their children resent their men for not being better providers. All the talk about the end of men has masked women's resentment of the men who are not affording them the opportunity to stay at home with their children.

Yet, feminism has long been fighting a culture war against the role of the male breadwinner. It has argued that a woman who depends on a man for financial support is a chattel slave.

There were times in history when women have been grossly mistreated. It is happening as we speak. There have been times when women have not been allowed to vote or to own property in their names.

Comparing those appalling practices to the custom of having a woman stay at home to be with her children evinces paranoid thinking. It's almost as stupid as thinking that a suburban housewife is living in conditions that are akin to those that existed in concentration camps.

If a woman chooses freely to stay at home radical feminists will say that she has been so corrupted by the patriarchy that she is colluding with her oppressors.

Rest assured, for radical feminists there is no such thing as a fact or an expression of a woman’s desire that could possibly disprove their ideology.

In reality, women do not stay on the job because they want to fulfill a feminist’s dream. They do it because they have to, because their families cannot maintain their lifestyle on a single income.

And they resent their husbands for not being good enough providers. Surely, this is not a good thing.

All of this means that a young woman who is not yet married and not yet a mother should plan ahead. For those young women who wish to make such  a plan Penelope Trunk offers some excellent advice.

Faced with a Foreign Policy Failure, the Administration Goes into Denial

If the Obama administration can’t get the messaging right how do you expect it to get the policy right.

During the past few days we have seen an uncommon spectacle. The crack Obama-Clinton foreign policy team cannot decide what to call what happened in Benghazi.

The American ambassador was assassinated by a mob and the administration seems to be divided between those who are calling it a terrorist attack and those who blame a Youtube video.

Now Obama and the State Department think they have found a middle ground by saying that they do not know.

Actually, it’s not a middle ground; it’s an Alfred E. Newman foreign policy: What me worry?

We are left with a multitude of metaphoric descriptions. Is the administration speaking out of both sides of its mouth? Is it speaking with forked tongue? Is it divided against itself? Is it of two minds? Is it schizoid? Is it using doubletalk? Is it plain ordinary denial?

It’s what happens when an administration engaged in a political campaign sees its Middle East policy turn to blood and dust.

After all, Obama has been campaigning as the president who decapitated al Qaeda and brought liberal democracy to the Middle East.

Recent events in Libya and Egypt have given the lie to his narrative.

Of course, Obama never had a policy. He had a narrative. Having bought the trendy leftist narrative that blamed Islamist rage on American disrespect, he has been trying to impose it on both America and the Middle East.

Inexperienced in the ways of the world and in the intricacies of foreign policy Obama believes that he just needs to stick with the story line. Then, everything else will follow.

The Obama-Clinton team cannot get its messaging right because it is trying to fulfill the terms of its narrative, not to implement a policy. Now that reality has given the lie to the narrative it is having trouble regaining its narrative foothold.

This morning Fouad Ajami offers the definitive analysis of the Obama foreign policy failure. He calls it “hubris undone.”

In his words:

No American president before this one had proclaimed such intimacy with a world that stretches from Morocco to Indonesia. From the start of his administration, Mr. Obama put forth his own biography as a bridge to those aggrieved nations. He would be a "different president," he promised, and the years he lived among Muslims would acquit him—and thus America itself. He was the un-Bush.

And so, in June 2009, Mr. Obama descended on Cairo. He had opposed the Iraq war, he had Muslim relatives, and he would offer Egyptians, and by extension other Arabs, the promise of a "new beginning." They told their history as a tale of victimization at the hands of outsiders, and he empathized with that narrative.

He spoke of "colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations."

Without knowing it, he had broken a time-honored maxim of that world: Never speak ill of your own people when in the company of strangers. There was too little recognition of the malignant trilogy—anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-modernism—that had poisoned the life of Egypt and much of the region.

To summarize, Obama did not lead with a principle or a policy proposal. He led with his biography. He told Middle Eastern Arabs and Muslims in general that he was one of them. They did not need to hate America anymore because America felt their pain.

In Obama's narrative, Arabs had been oppressed by colonial powers that had denied them their freedom, ravished their lands and deprived them of their human dignity.

According to the narrative the fault lies with the West, and, in particular, with America.

Arabs are the victims of American predations. Barack Obama would save the day because a majority of Americans saw him as the Savior. They elected him to redeem America’s sins. The American people would remove all the impediments to Arab flourishing and usher in a new Arab awakening.

Ajami shows clearly the problems with the narrative.

First, Obama ignored the cultural pathologies that had infested the region. Ajami sees them as what I would call a three-headed monster— anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, anti-modernism.

By ignoring indigenous pathologies Obama was denying the peoples of the region any moral responsibility for their lives. He was making them perfectly innocent, but he was also depriving them of the freedom to take responsibility.

Ajami is also saying that Obama failed to understand that the peoples of the region did not want liberal democracy and free market capitalism. They wanted to destroy any and all nations that had embraced these values.

Only in a fairy tale does the removal of a tyrant lead to a bright new democratic dawn.

Second, Ajami faults Obama, and not for the first time, for speaking ill of his nation and its people in front of strangers in a foreign country.

Ajami says that this principle is basic to Arab cultures. For my part I cannot think of any place where you will command respect by demeaning your own country.

If you do, your audience will think that you are trying to ingratiate yourself with your hosts by pretending to be one of them. Since they know for a fact that you do not belong to their tribe and distrust you for trying to trick them into thinking that you do.

Besides, if you are not loyal to your nation, how can anyone believe that you will be good to your word?

A man who bad mouths his country abroad is showing himself to be faithless, not to be trusted.

Redistribute This!

To no one’s surprise, but Barack Obama believes in redistributing wealth.  

He says that it’s really about giving everyone a fair shot, leveling the proverbial playing field.

Of course, if take points away from one team and give them to the other team, you have not given everyone fair shot. You have cheated one team at the expense of the other.

One might argue that America’s underprivileged would have a better shot at success if they were living in a better house in a better neighborhood.

Yet, when America tried to upgrade everyone’s home by relaxing lending standards the result was not a fair shot for the disadvantaged but a subprime mortgage crisis. As of now, many of those who took out subprime mortgages based on nothing have been left with less than nothing.

Since redistribution has failed everywhere it has ever been tried, it seems to have a special appeal for Obama.

This makes him more ideologue than pragmatist.

This morning Thomas Sowell does a masterful job of showing, as clearly as anyone I have read, why redistribution does not work.

In his words:

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler’s Holocaust in the 1940s.

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can confiscate only the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally have kept tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.

If the productive members of society are no longer working for themselves and their progeny they are going to be less productive. They have less incentive to produce when more of what they produce, or more of the profit, is going to be taxed or confiscated.

Besides, when you confiscate wealth people will resist and will spend more of their time and energy trying to keep what they have earned. This time and energy could be used for more productive activities.

Since wealth exists in assets whose value is determined in a market, a regime that confiscates assets will force the wealthy to liquidate their assets, thus lowering the value of everyone’s assets and making it far more difficult to attract investment capital.

Moreover, if the wealthy believe that their success is being unfairly punished, they might very well pick up and leave:

Among the most valuable assets in any nation are the knowledge, skills, and productive experience that economists call “human capital.” When successful people with much human capital leave the country, either voluntarily or because of hostile governments or hostile mobs whipped up by demagogues exploiting envy, lasting damage can be done to the economy they leave behind.

Fidel Castro’s confiscatory policies drove successful Cubans to flee to Florida, often leaving much of their physical wealth behind. But poverty-stricken refugees rose to prosperity again in Florida, while the wealth they left behind in Cuba did not prevent the people there from being poverty-stricken under Castro. The lasting wealth the refugees took with them was their human capital.