Is Vladimir Putin Outmaneuvering Us, Every Step of the Way?…with Jim Geraghty

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

September 6, 2013

Is Vladimir Putin Outmaneuvering Us, Every Step of the Way?

I don’t know how much stock to put in this assessment by David Samuels in Tablet magazine, but it sure is thought-provoking:

The prize Putin is seeking for obliterating the American “red line” is not victory in Syria—since his client Assad is clearly winning anyway. The point of the attack is to publically expose Obama’s deep ambivalence about the use of force to stop Iran. If Obama’s red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria can fall so easily, after the public deaths of more than 1,000 innocent people, including hundreds of children who died foaming at the mouth, how many cruise missiles might Iran’s putative acquisition of nuclear weapons capacity cost? Two hundred? One hundred? Zero? The answer now is plain: However many missiles they might fire, America has no stomach for fighting a war in Syria, let alone in Iran. . . .

By showing that Obama’s America is unable and unwilling to keep its promises, Putin has widened the leadership void in the Middle East—as a prelude to filling it himself. By helping to clear Iran’s path to a bomb, Putin positions himself as Iran’s most powerful ally—while paradoxically gaining greater leverage with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States, who would much rather negotiate with Russia than with Iran, their sworn enemy. While the Americans were heading out of the Middle East, and the Chinese were too busy with their own internal debates about the future of their economy and society, Putin saw that something valuable had been abandoned on the world stage, and he took it. For the price of 1,000 dead civilians in Damascus, he has gained great power status in the oil-rich Middle East. Iran, for its part, gets the bomb, which isn’t great news for anyone, but was probably going to happen anyway.

We can quibble with the details, but the general thrust makes quite a bit of sense, doesn’t it? Anybody doubt that Putin wants to see the United States reduced to an irrelevant afterthought in the Middle East, and for Russia to dramatically expand its sphere of influence?

Meanwhile, NBC News turns to body-language analysts to assure their readers that all is well, and that President Lightworker is immanentizing the Eschaton right on schedule:

President Barack Obama was intent on getting the upper hand as he greeted Russia’s Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit on Thursday, according to body language experts who watched the frosty exchange. . . .

[Joseph Tecce, a psychology professor and body-language scholar at Boston College] said that Putin nodded 10 times during the encounter, tilting his head down even though it would have made more sense to look up at the taller Obama.

“Putin is intimidated by Obama, Obama is not intimidated by Putin,” Tecce said.

Right. The lifelong KGB officer is quaking in his boots at the sight of the community organizer.

“That’s right, pal, I’m talking to you. This is my Clint Eastwood squint.”

McKay Coppins of Buzzfeed, wrote the piece that needed to be written, and that ought to be digested by everyone, but particularly by the administration and its fans in the media:

In the most actively cited example of the Republican nominee’s foresight, Romneyites point to the candidate’s hardline rhetoric last year against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his administration. During the campaign, Romney frequently criticized Obama for foolishly attempting to make common cause with the Kremlin, and repeatedly referred to Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe.”

Many observers found this fixation strange, and Democrats tried to turn it into a punchline. A New York Times editorial in March of last year said Romney’s assertions regarding Russia represented either “a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics.” And in an October debate, Obama sarcastically mocked his opponent’s Russia rhetoric. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” the president quipped at the time.

That line still chafes Robert O’Brien, a Los Angeles lawyer and friend of Romney’s who served as a foreign policy adviser. “Everyone thought, Oh my goodness that is so clever and Mitt’s caught in the Cold War and doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” O’Brien said. “Well guess what. With all of these foreign policy initiatives — Syria, Iran, [Edward] Snowden — who’s out there causing problems for America? It’s Putin and the Russians.”

Indeed, earlier this summer, Moscow defiantly refused to extradite National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to the United States, prompting Obama to cancel a meeting he had scheduled with Putin during the Group of 20 summit. Russia has blocked United Nations action against Syria. And on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told lawmakers that Russia was one of the countries supplying Syria with chemical weapons.

To Romney’s fans, these episodes illustrate just how unfairly their candidate was punished during the election for speaking truths the rest of the country would eventually come around to.

No, Romney wasn’t right about everything. But his assessment of the problems facing America, both globally and domestically (hello, bankrupt Detroit!) was a lot more accurate than Obama’s, and the press reflexively dismissed Romney’s arguments from word one.

The press was so determined that their hopey-changey idol had to be right that they never seriously examined what Romney was saying.

And now we’re here.

‘Credibility’? It’s Gone. It’s Not Coming Back Until January 2017 at the Earliest.

National Review‘s editors on Syria:

Credibility can seem an elusive commodity and one not worth firing shots over, but it is the coin of the realm in international relations, especially for a great power. . . . If we don’t act in this case, after all this windup, Iran and Hezbollah will take note of how little our admonitions to not acquire or use weapons of mass destruction really mean. We can’t know exactly what would come of our self-inflicted humiliation, but it would be nothing good. For that reason, we would vote “yes” on the authorization, although we think reasonable people can disagree, and we urge Congress to push the president to enunciate a Syria strategy beyond punishing it for its chemical-weapons use.

Here’s the thing: even if we launch some cruise missiles and blow up some Syrian military buildings our credibility is still in tatters. Everybody knows our president makes promises he can’t keep, threats he doesn’t intend to carry out, bluffs and then gets mad when others call his bluff.

President Obama is who we thought he was. He is who we said he was. And we let him off the hook! (storms away from podium)

Here’s MSNBC creating a Facebook graphic:

Except that you did set a red line, Mr. President. And we know “the world” didn’t set that red line, because “the world”, with the exception of Turkey and France, has decided they’re not willing to do anything militarily to punish Assad.

You notice Obama and Kerry keep insisting other nations are with us because they’ve issued statements denouncing Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Let me be clear: When a brutal dictator uses poison gas to kill hundreds of people, including children, issuing a denunciatory statement is almost literally the least you can do.

Lost credibility? We have a president who couldn’t persuade the British Labour Party to support unmanned airstrikes against a dictator who used sarin. It sounds like a joke. Diplomatically, that’s a six-inch putt, to put it in terms the president can appreciate. This is the salesmanship equivalent of selling beer in Ireland.

Ed Morrissey, over at that site I can’t link to because it gets this e-mail caught in spam filters:

This credibility crisis goes beyond Syria, however, and extends to the whole Arab Spring, for which Obama seemed all too pleased to take credit not terribly long ago. He demanded Hosni Mubarak’s ouster and quick elections in Egypt, which turned a stable American ally into a barely-contained disaster, and then has vacillated ever since on how to handle the crisis. Obama then led a NATO intervention in Libya while claiming not to want regime change, but ended up decapitating the Qaddafi regime anyway. That replaced a brutal dictatorship that was still cooperating with the West on counter-terrorism into a failed state that has allowed for a rapid expansion of radical Islamist terror networks through the whole region.

The NR editors wrote, “the Obama policy of passivity has, so far, proved a disaster.” Even if the tomahawks started flying, Obama’s inclination towards passivity will probably return with a vengeance, the moment everything went wrong. (Reminder: we still haven’t arrested, killed, or as far as we know, even pursued anyone for the attack in Benghazi.) It’s unlikely that Obama is transforming his entire worldview as a result of this painful experience.

He’s caught between a war he doesn’t really want to fight and his fear of being exposed as a guy who draws red lines but doesn’t enforce them. So he’s splitting the difference by pledging to bomb Syria, but not that badly. That won’t restore our national credibility.

Washington Post on Obama’s Red Line: Just a Bungled Talking Point

Come on, Washington Post Fact Checker. This is what makes people lose faith in the nonpartisan, fair, even-handed approach you claim to take:

To sum up, the president made an ill-considered rhetorical statement a year ago, without consulting his aides. But the White House staff decided they could not take it back and even considered it a useful example of firm presidential leadership when they needed to inform Congress of evidence of chemical weapons use by Syria.

But the president apparently was never comfortable with his own words. So when new talking points were crafted to make this line seem less like an “Obama red line” and more like a world-backed red line, the president bungled the language again. He made it appear as if he was denying he had called it a red line, when that was obviously not the case.

If he had used Kerry’s language, it would not have been as much of an issue: “The line I drew is the same one that the world has had for nearly 100 years.” Or something like that.

Of course, he didn’t say that. So is a bungled talking point worthy of Pinocchios? We don’t try to play gotcha here at The Fact Checker, so we are inclined to leave this question to our readers. Some may find the president’s apparent discomfort with his own words more meaningful than any potential misstatement.

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ADDENDA: Your fantasy football weekend is already done: “Not only did Peyton Manning tie NFL record with 7 TD passes, but his 46 fantasy points were 3rd-most by a QB since merger.”

NRO Digest — September 6, 2013

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