Taking down communism with a dinner knife

I grew up playing the game, Rush ‘n Attack, on my 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.  Basically this was a game where you were an American soldier fighting your way across Russian landscapes killing Commies with a knife.  From this game alone I think I am pretty much brainwashed to distrust Russians.  The nice thing about Nintendo is whenever the Russians got the upper hand, I could just push the reset button and start over.

Barack Obama has proven with his phony Hallmark video card to the Iranians that he knows how to engage foreign powers through shortsighted Western paradigms such as multiculturalism.  Apparently, multicultural overtures to hostile regimes must have run its useful course, because the Obama administration has decided against using such tactics, and has resorted to another shortsighted Western paradigm: brazen insensitivity and ignorance towards foes and friends alike.  Obama can be considerate of Iranian holidays, but when it comes to snubbing allies, he chooses the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Poland to announce the decision to discontinue an important strategic defense alliance with the Poles.  For those who thought Obama would bring a nice departure from Bush when it comes to foreign policy, this must be extremely disappointing.  For those of us without hopeychangey stars in our eyes, this would be a welcome turn of events, but to couple Bush’s insensitivity and ignorance, with Obama’s ineptitude and weakness isn’t the kind of synergy that is becoming for any U.S. president.

Reset with the push of a button

Where resetting a Nintendo game when things don’t go your way with the Russians was a good strategy for an 8-year-old playing a game, bringing a plastic reset button to diplomatic meeting with the Russians as a symbolic gesture indicating that we would like to return to the good ole days when Russia was the irrelevant rubble of a former empire is an indication that it wouldn’t hurt to have a Secretary of State with a brain.  Or, as George Friedman from stratfor put it, “It is hard to imagine anything as infuriating for the Russians as the reset button the Clinton administration’s Russia experts — who now dominateObama’s Russia policy — presented the Russian leadership in all seriousness. The Russians simply do not intend to return to the Post-Cold War era Western experts recall so fondly.”  Instead the Russians seem to be enjoying the era they are in.  The one where they control the energy spigot to Europe, where they have puppets in Iran and North Korea that they can lever against American interests, and where they get to deal with the first American president since Jimmy Carter that has no balls when it comes to foreign policy.  There have been two significant bull-markets since Obama took office: one in guns and bullets as ordinary Americans sense the weakness of their president and have rushed to take the matter of protecting themselves into their own hands, and one in concessions to the foreign powers that have most recently been our biggest enemies.

Where Obama’s foreign policy has mostly focused on changing atmospherics with our enemies, which our enemies perceive as a weakness to exploit, this strategy has enabled Obama to live up to his pre-presidential reputation of “voting present” when it comes to foreign policy rather than make decisions.  Unfortunately for Obama and the United States, Iran, the Taliban, Russia, and China aren’t just voting present when it comes to advancing their strategic foreign policy interests.  Unfortunately for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, most of Europe, Poland, and the Czech Republic, America under Obama’s leadership seems no longer interested in aggressively pursuing its strategic interests.

It is not long before Obama is going to have to make a decision on what to do with Iran and Afghanistan.  According to George Friedman from Stratfor:

Every president is tested in foreign policy, sometimes by design and sometimes by circumstance. Frequently, this happens at the beginning of his term as a result of some problem left by his predecessor, a strategy adopted in the campaign or a deliberate action by an antagonist. How this happens isn’t important. What is important is that Obama’s test is here. Obama at least publicly approached the presidency as if many of the problems the United States faced were due to misunderstandings about or the thoughtlessness of the United States. Whether this was correct is less important than that it left Obama appearing eager to accommodate his adversaries rather than confront them.

No one has a clear idea of Obama’s threshold for action.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban takes the view that the British and Russians left, and that the Americans will leave, too. We strongly doubt that the force level proposed by McChrystal will be enough to change their minds. Moreover, U.S. forces are limited, with many still engaged in Iraq. In any case, it isn’t clear what force level would suffice to force the Taliban to negotiate or capitulate — and we strongly doubt that there is a level practical to contemplate.

In Iran, Ahmadinejad clearly perceives that challenging Obama is low-risk and high reward. If he can finally demonstrate that the United States is unwilling to take military action regardless of provocations, his own domestic situation improves dramatically, his relationship with the Russians deepens, and most important, his regional influence — and menace — surges. If Obama accepts Iranian nukes without serious sanctions or military actions, the American position in the Islamic world will decline dramatically. The Arab states in the region rely on the United States to protect them from Iran, so U.S. acquiescence in the face of Iranian nuclear weapons would reshape U.S. relations in the region far more than a hundred Cairo speeches.

There are four permutations Obama might choose in response to the dual crisis. He could attack Iran and increase forces in Afghanistan, but he might well wind up stuck in a long-term war in Afghanistan. He could avoid that long-term war by withdrawing from Afghanistan and also ignore Iran’s program, but that would leave many regimes reliant on the United States for defense against Iran in the lurch. He could increase forces in Afghanistan and ignore Iran — probably yielding the worst of all possible outcomes, namely, a long-term Afghan war and an Iran with a nuclear program if not nuclear weapons.

On pure logic, history or politics aside, the best course is to strike Iran and withdraw from Afghanistan. That would demonstrate will in the face of a significant challenge while perhaps reshaping Iran and certainly avoiding a drawn-out war in Afghanistan. Of course, it is easy for those who lack power and responsibility — and the need to govern — to provide logical choices. But the forces closing in on Obama are substantial, and there are many competing considerations in play.

Presidents eventually arrive at the point where something must be done, and where doing nothing is very much doing something. At this point, decisions can no longer be postponed, and each choice involves significant risk. Obama has reached that point, and significantly, in his case, he faces a double choice. And any decision he makes will reverberate.

Given the gravity of the decisions that Obama now faces, and given the fact that these problems can’t be solved by giving a speech, it is too bad that we don’t have a reset button.  This doesn’t appear to be a game that we are going to win.