November 18, 2014--Minding Our Business

Briefly--

Why is it that every president since at least Harry Truman, when abroad, feels the need to lecture other leaders about human rights?

Most recently Barack Obama in China where he chided his host, President Xi Jinping, about stifling political dissent in Hong Kong, then during a quick visit to Myanmar he gently prodded fellow Nobel Prize winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi about her country's resistance to power sharing with the opposition, and then a day or two later at the G-20 summit in Australia where he again took Vladimir Putin to task for Russia's incursions in Ukraine.

Without doubt, China, Russia, Myanmar, and a host of other countries could do a lot better. A lot. But is it our place to criticize them about their human rights crimes and misdemeanors?

Back in the old Cold War days in response to our constant hammering on abuses in the repressive Soviet Union, though God knows there was much to point out, Soviet leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev were equally quick to retort that we were hypocritical, that we had human rights problems of our own, most notable that there was still government sanctioned and imposed segregation that kept Negroes "in their place" and Native Americans mainly confined to arid reservations.

And today, if they were inclined (and Putin certainly has been--severely criticizing us as the cause of most of the problems in today's Middle East) they could point out that after six years of the Obama presidency Guantanamo is still operating, U.S. citizens are routinely spied on by many government agencies, and poverty and inequality are worsening.

I know that one reason American leaders feel it necessary to criticize the records of others--even when being hosted by them--is to demonstrate to the rightwing back home that they are tough enough to stand up to our adversaries while trumpeting our alleged "exceptionalism."

My question to traveling presidents--In a dangerously fractured world, where we should be seeking to reduce tensions even with leaders we despise (Putin comes to mind), do we need another Cold War, do we want to chill further relations with our major trading partner and debt holder (China), do we want more Westerners to be beheaded in Iraq, do we want to find peaceful ways to keep Iran from getting The Bomb?

I am more and more attracted to Henry-Kissinger-style realpolitik--diplomacy based primarily on power and practical and material considerations rather than on ideological notions or ethical premises.

Just as we hate it when others point fingers at us, it's time for us get off our proverbial high horse.

September 9, 2013--Good Yontif in Farsi

While much of the attention focused on the Middle East last week was about the United States' struggle with how to respond to Syria's use of chemical weapons on its own citizens, there was another important story that were virtually ignored.

The press covered every minute of President Obama attempt while in St. Petersburg for the G-20 summit to convince at least a few leaders of the world's most powerful nations to support limited military strikes against the Assad regime's capacity to deploy these weapons of mass destruction.  He secured little overt endorsement and may have to settle for going it along, assuming Congress grants him the authority to do so.

Dealing with Congress was the concurrent part of the Syria story. Equally covered by the media wall-to-wall were the deals the Obama administration was working on to garner enough bipartisan support for this authorization. At least half of what was discussed was how big a blow it would be to Obama's prestige and to undercutting the power of the presidency if the Congress failed to do so.

The other half was devoted to how this would play out in the rest of the Middle East, particularly how Iran would react if the U.S. were seen as weakened by bipartisan anti-war sentiment.

If Obama couldn't enforce the red line he drew regarding Syria's use of poison gas, how likely would he be to enforce an even more crucial one--not allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons? And, always of course, how would Israel react? What would Israel do if the United States was suddenly perceived to be impotent?

These are all important subjects well worth detailed coverage and discussion. But almost lost in the shuffle of Syria-related stories was what might be happening in Iran now that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no longer president and his successor, the "moderate" Hassan Rouhani appointed an even more moderate, American-educated Javad Zarif as Foreign Minister.

Both, if you can believe it, on the eve of the highest of Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, sent out Tweets, wishing Jews a Happy New Year.

Semi-buried on page A9 of the New York Times, President Rouhani's Tweet was quoted--

As the sun is about to set here in Tehran I wish all Jews, especially Iranian Jews, a blessed Rosh Hashanah. 

And while they were wishing Jews a Good Yontif, unlike Ahmadinejad, who made a habit of it, they dismissed the idea that the Holocaust never happened.

In response to a Tweet from Nancy Pelosi's daughter, Christine, who is married to a Jew, in a message to Foreign Minister Zarif in which she said that the new year would be even sweeter if he would stop denying the reality of the Holocaust, he responded--

Iran never denied it. The man who was perceived to be denying it is now gone. Happy New Year. 

That "man" who is now "gone," of course, is the aforementioned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

He was not just "perceived" to be a Holocaust denier--he in fact emphatically and repeatedly was. But the Tweets from Iran's recently-elected leadership (though the ultimate ruler remains Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) are encouraging.

Perhaps something good will emerge from the new regime in Tehran. Maybe a deal that would see Iran back off from its nuclear weapons program and, in response, we would agree to end the sanctions that are wrecking Iran's economy--the real source of the apparent sea change in attitudes and, let's hope, behavior.

This to me is the major story of last week.

September 4, 2013--Cброс (Reset)

As President Obama departs for St. Petersburg for the G-20 summit, the New York Times ran a long piece about the fractious state of U.S.-Russian relations.

As evidence of this, though Obama will be in Russia, there will be no on-on-one with Vladimir Putin because Obama petulantly canceled their meeting after Russia granted temporary asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowdon.

Talk about diplomatic bumbling.

Early in Obama's first term, with Putin constitutionally not allowed to run for a third consecutive term, he turned the presidency over to the malleable Dmitri Medvedev. To anyone paying even a little attention (and that included me), it was obvious that Putin would be the power behind the presidency during Medvedev's four years, essentially telling him what to say and do.

Obama, probably happy not to have to deal directly with Putin all that much--former KGB operative and unrepentant grumpy cold warrior that he is--thought there was an opportunity to reset the big-powers' relationship through a friendship with Medvedev. They were both lawyers, they were of a post-Cold War generation, and Obama thought that if they managed to hit it off personally they could get a few disarmament agreements signed and the U.S.-Russian relationship, which had cooled down during Putin's first presidency would be reset (in Russian, cброс).

Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was skeptical about things getting better as the result of a warm relationship between Obama and Medvedev, was dispatched to Russia to meet with Medvedev and Putin. To make note of the reseting agenda, she brought along buttons for the two Russian leaders with "reset" embossed on them, except that she didn't get the Russian quite right--there was a typo. I think it read Coрос But, in any case, all things being equal, it was a fun idea.

But all things were not equal. With Putin returned to the presidency there was no avoiding him, and from their first presidential  encounters things went from bad to worse.

Putin was obsessed with the Arab Spring and his feeling that it was all a plot promulgated by the United States to see long-standing dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi toppled and even killed with new governments installed that would replicate Western democracies. All of this chaos, Putin perceived, right on Russia's doorsteps, in their one remaining geopolitical sphere of influence.

No one in the Obama administration seemed to realize that from Putin's perspective there was a lot to be upset about. In the North Caucuses Putin and Russia have their own problems with Muslim fundamentalists. Chechnya, for example, has for decades been in violent rebellion. Ever since the break up of the Soviet Union.

Additionally Putin himself was under attack by many from the new Russian technocratic middle class. There were unprecedented street demonstrations in Moscow and elsewhere of a size and force not seen in Russia since the last days of the Czar.

And, closer to the point, czar-like Putin himself was undoubtedly feeling threatened. Perhaps, he claimed, with U.S encouragement (and he blamed America and somehow specifically Hillary Clinton for the street demonstrations) Russia would have it own version of the Arab Spring and Putin would wind up in prison like Hosni Mubarak.

So should it have been any wonder to Barak Obama that Putin would be more interested in potentially saving his own skin than agreeing to another nuclear weapons treaty?

Is it, should it have been a surprise to Obama and his foreign policy team that Putin would ask every time he met with a U.S. official, including the secretary of state and the president himself, that he would insist on asking when America was going to bomb Syria?

U.S officials assured him that we wouldn't be doing that. That with our reset Russian friends we had no intention of getting involved militarily with their ally, Syria.

Oh really.

So we're back to a version of the Cold War and according to wise heads such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, things in Syria are looking ominously like Eastern Europe in 1914.

Zbig may be right; he may be overreacting. But I know that if he were a member of the Obama team (and it's too bad he isn't) we wouldn't be conducting foreign policy with Cброс buttons.