Obama’s 3AM phone call from Egypt

posted at 7:29 pm on February 10, 2011 by Steven Den Beste

With the events happening in Egypt, there’s been a lot of criticism of Obama’s handling of the situation, plus intimations that there isn’t any consistent policy involved.

Actually, I think there is a consistent policy here, but you have to know what to look for.

Obama fully adheres to the leftist idea that America has been throwing its weight around far too much. Americans are too arrogant; they think they know the right answers for everything, and Americans butt into internal politics in other countries far too often.

The whole point of the World Apology Tour was that Obama was promising that America was going to stop doing that. Instead of seeing America as exceptional, policeman to the world, America was going to stop thinking of itself as exceptional. America would assume its place as just one more country and mind its own damned business.

When things exploded in Egypt, and Obama got that legendary 3AM phone call, his policy was to stay neutral. Not because he was “voting present”, though that’s what it amounted to, but rather because he doesn’t believe it’s any of America’s business to interfere with what is going on in Egypt. It’s an internal Egyptian affair, and America shouldn’t be trying to pick a winner, let alone directly aiding any one faction. If America is a good citizen of the world, and not the world’s policeman, then America should stand back and let the Egyptians decide their own fate without getting involved.

In other words, for Obama “voting present” isn’t an indication of indecision. It’s an active decision, one he considers the right answer. It’s how America should behave when this kind of thing goes down.

And he can even point to the recent past for a lesson: Honduras in 2009. Obama did try to pick a winner, and he picked wrong. Had he stayed out of it, the result would have been better diplomatically for the US.

If he were allowed to, I think that he would have wanted to stay completely neutral in the case of Egypt, and waited for a winner to emerge, and then tried to negotiate with that winner. But it wasn’t possible, and so what we’ve been seeing is him bowing to pressure to try to choose a side, but doing his best to make that endorsement as tepid and tentative as he possibly can, so that if (as was the case in Honduras) he picked wrong, it didn’t end up poisoning the situation afterwards.

This idea of “America the stupid bully” is a staple of left-wing political thought. Remember “Ask yourself why they hate you”? That’s another manifestation of the same principle. For the left wing it is not just an article of faith, but a Known Fact that every time America interferes in the affairs of another country, the result is death and disaster.

Obama is nothing if not doctrinaire left wing, and I think this idea of “New America the former bully who learned its lesson and leaves everyone else alone” is the philosophical foundation of Obama’s foreign policy.

Of course, just as with all the other left wing policies that Obama has adopted, it doesn’t survive real world test.

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