Vector of American Foreign Policy

If you were wondering about the vector of American foreign and military policy in the next four years, you could do worse than examine the new national security team: John Brennan, John Kerry, Charles Hagel, and Martin Dempsey.

John Brennan

Brennan is first among equals as a White House intimate, a staffer who has had the president’s ear for four years. He is also the sponsor of a foreign policy where Islamism is the central, yet invisible, nexus of near and distant national security threats.   ”Invisible” because Mr. Brennan has made his mark as an articulate apologist for, and co- architect of, a policy of stealth appeasement.  

The pillars of the Brennan doctrine are threefold: high visibility engagement with Islam, low visibility isolation of Israel, and clandestine kinetic containment of “radicals.” Wars of the future war under a Brennan doctrine will be confined to joystick combat, military gamers in Nevada using drones for selective global retribution.

Withal, any solo holy warrior, or Muslim organization, that kills in the name of Allah or jihad, or sympathizes with terror tactics, will still be characterized as an unrepresentative minority.  Thus, a larger Muslim culture, especially the Arab vanguard, enjoys a kind of blanket absolution and no incentives to reform.  With Brennan, obliviousness is the burka that obscures the obvious.

Such minimization allows the ideological threat to be contained; theoretically confined to the likes of al Qaeda. Never mind that Pew surveys of Muslim attitudes in general, Arab opinion in particular, consistently register toxic levels of hostility towards the West; anti- Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-American sentiments are rampant.

With the Brennan doctrine, statistical evidence, numbers of Islamist adherents and numbers of western casualties do not matter. The lynchpin of 21st century moral pandering is a phenomenon that Theodore Dalrymple calls “incontinent forgiveness” and Rebecca Bynum clarifies as “tolerance raised above justice and forgiveness (raised) above mercy.” With the Brennan doctrine, the body bags of US Marines from Lebanon, New York’s Twin Towers, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lockerbie, Beslan, the USS Cole, or Benghazi are negligible investments in soft power, a strategy downsized to accommodate elusive goals like nation-building (nee development), transition, and stability — objectives with no clear measures of effectiveness.  Defeating theo-fascism is not part of the Brennan plan.