Obama Redux Redux

Let me put my cards on the table right at the start. I think that the U. S.’s biggest foreign policy challenges are

• Reindustrializing America. If you don’t think that’s a foreign policy challenge, consider that U. S. prestige is founded, not on admiration of American values, but on admiration of the American economy and military might. Doing that will be opposed tooth and nail by our notional European allies. Doing what we need to do will also probably catch flak from the WTO and the BANANA wing of the environmental movement.
• Reassure our Asian allies (Japan, South Korea, India, Philippines, etc.) in the face of an increasingly aggressive China.
• Build better relationships with our Central and South American neighbors and do what we can to help their economies and encourage political liberalization. The job-seekers masquerading as asylum-seekers showing up on our borders are best deterred by increasing the opportunities available to them at home. And we do need to deter them.
• Butt out of other people’s civil wars or, worse, wars of aggression.

Armed with that let’s turn to Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column. In the column Dr. Mead expresses skepticism of the Biden Administration present course on foreign policy:

The Biden team is driven by conviction. It really believes that America’s leading position in the world rests on global admiration for U.S. values. The administration thinks America’s alliance network is based on those values and Washington’s commitment to a multilateral approach. President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, in this view, was an all-out assault on the foundations of U.S. power.

Let us hope that Mr. Biden’s leadership will strengthen alliances and rally the rattled forces of democracy against rival authoritarian great powers. But talk is easy; work is hard.

No president in recent decades made as many inspiring speeches about democracy and human rights as President Obama—and yet no administration in recent decades saw authoritarian powers make so many gains. In 2011 Mr. Obama put down a marker in Syria: “The time has come for President Assad to step aside.” A decade later, propped up by Russia and Iran, Bashar Assad is still there.

It is very well for Mr. Biden to say he isn’t Mr. Trump, but what he needs to demonstrate to the world is that he isn’t Mr. Obama. The Obama administration’s mix of tough words and fumbled deeds in places like Egypt and Syria—along with its serial failures to curb Russian and Chinese power plays from Crimea to the South China Sea—badly diminished American prestige. The prospect that the new administration will similarly dissipate Washington’s energy and credibility in empty gestures and moralistic word salads quietly worries U.S. allies (and delights and encourages American adversaries).

He barely scratches the surface of the shortfalls in the Obama Administration’s foreign policy which included:

• Failing to recognize that nation-building in Afghanistan is a Sisyphean task which the Trump Administration was unable to call to a conclusion and which threatens to be reinvigorated.
• Lack of attention to the myriad economic and political problems in Central and South America.
• Intervention in civil wars in Libya and Syria and a war of aggression of the KSA against Yemen.
• Expansion of drone warfare (which the Trump Administration also underwrote).

Do we really want to return to tho
se? I should add that there’s an open question as to whether Israel will actually attack Iran if the Biden Administration attempt to return to the JCPOA.

One more point. I there’s something to be learned from the Carter Administration, it’s that although human rights and democracy promotion may inform American foreign policy, we can’t let it become the extent of American foreign policy.