How Brave the Meaningless

posted at 12:32 pm on September 23, 2009 by J.E. Dyer
[ Diplomacy ]   

It is hard for me to be impressed by the determination of the Europeans and Canadians to walk out on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the UN.  I’m sorry to be a killjoy, but this is a college protest-type gesture, ostentatious but unaccountable.

The irony is that it has been made possible by the can’t-get-to-his-leftism of Barack Obama.  Our NATO allies would never have done this with George W. Bush in office.  Bush might have interpreted the gesture as the basis for a commitment – to, like, actually do stuff, and stuff.

But Obama?  Obama has, just this morning, regardless of anything he or his envoys have said to the Israelis in the last six months, told the UN that the Israeli settlements are, categorically, “illegitimate.”  That America is not a superpower and doesn’t want to be one.  After months of bowing to King Abdullah, yukking it up with Chavez, affirming Ahmadinejad’s legitimacy, dealing in bad faith with our actual allies, trying to force a constitution-chopping aspiring president-for-life on the Honduran people, and promising unilateral disarmament, Obama has today given the least-responsible speech to the UN ever given by an American president.

Obama, however much he may require of his own people, is obviously not going to require anything of our foreign allies.  He has maneuvered himself into a position from which he has no standing to even ask.  Who couldn’t be more morally stern than Obama?  Who couldn’t project a tougher image, in terms of actually, substantively defending Western liberalism and American exceptionalism?  Phil Donahue looks like Cap Weinberger compared to Obama.

It is toweringly easy and virtually cost-free to make political gestures, when you’re an ally of Obama’s America.  George Bush might expect you to pony up real, material support for a tough position.  But with Obama, you’re the tough guy in the room – and it costs you nothing!  You, the ally, have no “ownership” of the prized negotiations-without-preconditions Obama has obtained with Iran.  That’s all Obama’s deal.  It’s his problem to figure out how to treat with Ahmadinejad, not yours.  Now that the American president could never be suspected of planning to do anything summary or effective about Iran’s nuclear program, you can strike all the poses you want on the international stage, and you’ll never be held to account for any of it.

I don’t mean to denigrate the honest moral repugnance many of our allies’ people have for Ahmadinejad’s career of Holocaust denial.  I have it too, and I sympathize with the urge to boycott him.  But Americans need to be clear on the dynamics here.  The reason this gesture is even at issue is that it is the only thing that might be done against Ahmadinejad.  Our allies will not, in our stead, prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. They will not put pressure on the mullahs’ sclerotic theocracy as it reels from the persistent protests and dissent of the Iranian people.  They will not back up Israel or the other nations of the region when those nations find themselves under pressure from a nuclear-armed Iran.  Indeed, our allies will fold like a cheap accordion under Iran’s deterrent capacity with a nuclear arsenal.  With Obama busy disarming and disavowing Western ideals, and with Russia and Iran looming to their east, a UN walk-out on Ahmadinejad is likely to be one of the last bleats of a free and liberal Europe.

Hollywood has conditioned us to think that moments of great moral importance to the disposition of mankind last an hour, and are attended by paroxysms of sympathetic emotion.  But in fact, such moments usually fly under the radar, drag on for longer than almost anyone can stand, and are infested by the cacophony of dissent and dissembling.  The world is at a great turning point today, but the fulcrum will not be any staged moment in the UN.  One increasingly fears that there will have to be a fight – a hot war – to reaffirm the lines of security for whatever is left of the liberal Western world.  And we may well be surprised by who fights on what side in that conflict.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions“.

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