Victor Davis Hanson: A Weak U.S. Leads Inevitably To Global Chaos
6 Comments05/27/2015 04:11 PM ET
Victor Davis Hanson
a time, reset, concessions and appeasement work to delay wars. But
finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm and face down
enemies. That gets dangerous. The shocked aggressors cannot quite
believe that their targets are suddenly serious and willing to punch
back. Usually, the bullies foolishly press aggression, and war breaks
out.
It was insane of Nazi Germany and its Axis partners to even
imagine that they could defeat the Allied trio of Imperial Britain, the
Soviet Union and the United States. But why not try?
Hitler
figured that for a decade America had been unarmed and isolationist.
Britain repeatedly had appeased the Third Reich. The Soviets initially
collaborated with Hitler.
Hitler met no opposition after
militarizing the Rhineland. He annexed Austria with impunity. He gobbled
up Czechoslovakia without opposition. Why shouldn't he be stunned in
1939 when exasperated Britain and France finally declared war over his
invasion of distant Poland?
Six years of war and some 60 million
dead followed, re-establishing what should have been the obvious fact
that democracies would not quite commit suicide.
By 1979, the
Jimmy Carter administration had drastically cut the defense budget.
Carter promised that he would make human rights govern American foreign
policy. It sounded great to Americans after Vietnam — and even greater
to America's enemies.
Then Iran imploded. The American embassy in
Tehran was stormed. Diplomats were taken hostage. Radical Islamic
terrorism spread throughout the Middle East. Communist insurrection
followed throughout Central America. The Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan. China went into Vietnam.
Dictators such as the Soviet
Union's Leonid Brezhnev and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini assumed Carter no
longer was willing to protect the U.S. postwar order. Or perhaps they
figured the inexperienced American president was too weak to respond
even had he wished to do so.
Then, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter
in 1980 on the promise of restoring U.S. power. At first, both America's
friends and enemies were aghast at Reagan's simplistic worldview that
free markets were better than communism, that democracy was superior to
dictatorship, and that in the ensuing struggle, the West would win and
the rest would lose.
Foreign media damned Reagan as a warmonger
for beefing up the U.S. defense budget, reassuring America's allies and
going after terrorists with military force. From 1981 to 1983, Reagan
was caricatured even at home as a cowboy — not the statesman later to be
known for restoring U.S. prestige and global stability, and helping to
bring down Soviet imperial communism.
Barack Obama, like Carter,
came into office promising a sharp break from past U.S foreign policy.
The public was receptive after the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
and the recent financial meltdown on Wall Street.
Troops were
withdrawn from Afghanistan on pre-announced deadlines. The post-surge
quiet in Iraq fooled Obama into eagerly yanking out all U.S.
peacekeepers.
A new outreach to radical Islam went to ridiculous
lengths. The Muslim Brotherhood was invited to Obama's speech in Cairo
that claimed the West owed cultural debts to Islam for everything from
the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
Terms like radical Islam,
jihad and Islamic terror were excised from the official American
vocabulary and replaced by a host of silly euphemisms. In symbolic
tours, Obama offered apologies for past American behavior in the Middle
East and Asia. He bowed to both theocratic sheiks and the Asian
monarchs.
The defense budget was cut. Reset with Vladimir Putin's
Russia assumed the Bush administration, not Putin's aggression in
Georgia and threats to Crimea, caused the estrangement between Moscow
and Washington.
Predictable chaos followed as the U.S. became an
observer abroad. The Islamic State appeared to fill the vacuum in Iraq.
Syria imploded. So did most of North Africa. Iran sent agents,
surrogates and special forces into Iraq, Syria and Yemen, even as it
pressed on to get a bomb. China stepped up its violations of the waters
and airspace of America's traditional Asian allies. Putin did the same
in Eastern and Northern Europe.
By 2015, America's enemies had
created chaos and defined it as the new normal. The next president will
face a terrible dilemma. To restore order, he or she will have to
convince our allies we are recommitted to their security.
Any red
lines issued will have to be enforced. Aggressors such as Russia, China,
Iran and the Islamic State will have to be warned to cease and desist
or face pushback from far stronger U.S.-led coalitions.
Just as
Reagan's return to normal U.S. foreign policy was considered radical
after the Carter years, so too the next administration will be smeared
as dangerously provocative after Obama's recession from the world stage.
The
Obama foreign policy cannot continue much longer without provoking even
more chaos or a large war. Yet correcting it will be nearly as
dangerous. Jumping off the global tiger is dangerous, but climbing back
on will seem riskier.
• Hanson is a classicist and historian at
the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most
recently, of "The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and
Modern."
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