Er, would that be Professor Barack Obama? I understand he’s giving a lecture on medieval times at Medieval Times in Baltimore. Perhaps one might joust with him a bit there over it. And as soon as Obama finishes taking care of the eleventh century, he’ll step right up and answer Chuck Todd’s question.
Actually, Todd wanted Susan Rice to provide the answer, which says something about Obama’s lack of performance on this score (note: this aired before Susan Rice’s speech):
At 1:00 pm ET today at the Brookings Institution, National Security Adviser Susan Rice will deliver remarks on the Obama administration’s national security strategy. This event will prompt many of the administration’s critics — and even some of its supporters — to ask: “Is there really a strategy?” …
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that more Americans approve of Obama’s handling of the economy (49%) than handling of foreign policy (37%), according to last month’s NBC/WSJ poll. (It wasn’t that long ago when those numbers were reversed.) To be sure, the administration has had one foreign-policy success, sort of — getting Europe to economically isolate Russia, but it’s an incomplete success since the sanctions haven’t actually CHANGED Putin’s behavior. As a whole, the administration’s strategy looks more like crisis management than an actual strategy. A lot of that has to do with the Iraq war, of course. This administration and its advisers are incredibly gun-shy about getting dragged into quagmires.
They don’t seem to mind starting quagmires, though. The Obama administration took down the Qaddafi dictatorship in Libya with no strategy for what followed afterward there, either. Instead, Libya has become a failed state on the Mediterranean, giving Islamist terror networks a strategic base of operations against Europe. We almost did the same thing with Egypt, but the Egyptian military seized control from the Muslim Brotherhood to prevent it from turning the country into a radical Islamist stronghold.
Now we have Yemen falling completely today into the hands of Shi’ite extremists. The Houthis that seized the government a week ago have announced that the country’s parliament has been sent home, and one more to their liking will take its place:
Yemen’s Shiite rebels announced on Friday that they were taking over the country and dissolving parliament, marking their formal takeover of the government and finalizing a power grab that has been months in the making.
The rebels, known as Houthis, took control of the capital, Sanaa, in September, after descending from their northern stronghold and fighting their way into central Yemen, seizing several other cities and towns along the way.
According to the rebels, a “transitional national council of 551 members” was to immediately replace the elected parliament. That “transitional” administration would last two years, according to the statement. At the executive level the government would be led by a “presidential council” consisting of five members, to be elected by the council. …
Their escalating dominance — which included a raid of the presidential palace and a siege of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s residence — forced the president and all Cabinet members to submit their resignations in January.
Since then, Hadi and the ministers have been under house arrest. The rebels issued a deadline, which expired on Wednesday, for Yemen’s political parties to negotiate what they called an “acceptable” way forward. Otherwise, they threatened they would act unilaterally.
The Hadi government formed after the US and Saudi Arabia pressured the previous Saleh dictatorship into withdrawing in November 2011, at the waning of the Arab Spring. Supposedly, this was supposed to accelerate self-determination, even though Yemen had both al-Qaeda (Sunnis) and the Houthis (Shi’ite) competing for terrorist supremacy. The result is another failed state, one this time managed mostly by Shi’ites with ties to Iran. That will allow Tehran even more power in the region:
The Houthis have received forms of assistance from Iran, turning Yemen into another possible battleground between Tehran and the Middle East’s Sunni states.
Yemen is just one of several Middle Eastern countries in which groups either allied with or directed by Iran are the strongest political and military actor.
In fact, to the extent that this administration has a strategy in the Middle East, it appears to be tilting toward Tehran. Obama pulled entirely out of Iraq, against the advice of his Defense secretaries, allowing Nouri al-Maliki to push the Sunnis and Kurds out of the military and government and tilt decisively toward Tehran. That created an opening for al-Qaeda in Iraq to roar back to life as ISIS from the midst of the Syrian civil war and made the Iraqi army impotent to stop it. Now we’re fighting the enemies of Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s closest ally, while setting up Yemen to fall under Tehran’s orbit.
Now we’re negotiating a nuclear-power treaty with Iran on the hope that they will exercise more hegemony in the region. The Washington Post editorial board is aghast:
The problems raised by authorities ranging from Henry Kissinger, the country’s most senior former secretary of state, to Sen. Timothy M. Kaine, Virginia’s junior senator, can be summed up in three points:
●First, a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and temporarily restrict that capability.
●Second, in the course of the negotiations, the Obama administration has declined to counter increasingly aggressive efforts by Iran to extend its influence across the Middle East and seems ready to concede Tehran a place as a regional power at the expense of Israel and other U.S. allies.
●Finally, the Obama administration is signaling that it will seek to implement any deal it strikes with Iran — including the suspension of sanctions that were originally imposed by Congress — without a vote by either chamber. Instead, an accord that would have far-reaching implications for nuclear proliferation and U.S. national security would be imposed unilaterally by a president with less than two years left in his term.
The tilt toward Iran, which has become so apparent that Israel has begun openly complaining about it as American policy allows Iranian power to expand, seems motivated by Barack Obama’s attempt to hit a home run and set his foreign-policy legacy. He insisted during the 2008 campaign that he could succeed in getting Iran to negotiate reasonably, part of his “Bush is a cowboy” rhetoric before and during that campaign. He scoffed at the notion that Iran was a threat seven years ago, calling it a tiny country compared to the old Soviet Union (the newer iteration of which Obama has failed to counter effectively as well). At one point in 2007, Obama pledged to meet one-on-one with the head of the Iranian government before his campaign wisely walked back that promise.
Six years into his presidency, Obama hasn’t been able to get the Iranian leadership to act reasonably, because they’re an extremist clique with extremist goals of regional domination. Instead of coming to his senses, Obama is becoming more and more desperate to prove himself correct, to the point of actually begging Iran to become the regional hegemon, in part due to Obama’s feckless policies in Iraq and during the Arab Spring. The nuclear deal outlined above isn’t designed to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon — it’s designed to delay it until his successor takes office so that Obama won’t get the blame for it.
It’s appeasement, and nothing more. The only things missing are the piece of paper and the umbrella.
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