Better in their words…

Obama trusts Putin more than Americans…
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By MARTIN PERETZ
When President Obama blurted out to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he couldn’t do serious business during an election year, the New York Times characterized it as a “moment of political candor.” It seems to me, actually, to be a moment of political contempt—for the issues at hand as well as for the demos itself. Mr. Medvedev meanwhile was in familiar territory: Dissembling is the routine of the elected Russian dictatorship.

We are the big boys, Mr. Obama seemed to be telling Mr. Medvedev— or rather Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and I are, and you, Medvedev, are the messenger, to whom, as the newspaper photograph shows, I confide. “I will deliver this information to Vladimir,” responded the second man in the Kremlin. Another news picture shows an image from the back, the two presidents walking together, the American chief executive with his big right hand firmly on his Russian junior partner’s much slighter shoulder.

And what was the message to Vladimir? Mr. Obama was proffering the Russians “more flexibility” on missile defense, which he couldn’t do, he said, in an election year.

But really the message, the important one, concerns us, here in America. It is that the American people can’t be trusted if the president is honest with them about what he proposes. More bluntly, that the American people are not trusted by their own president. Otherwise the president would tell us the truth about his intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust of his own people to a leader of a nasty foreign government that seeks to thwart our purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. President Obama is in cahoots with the Russian regime against America’s very body politic.

Mr. Obama’s revealing comment, and the question of missile defense, and the question of Mr. Obama’s bizarre desire for coziness with Vladimir Putin, is a matter about which our European allies have great concerns.

Additional “give” to Moscow on the nuclear issue was not something he admitted to the relevant senators that he was contemplating when they were weighing and approving the New Start Treaty a bare year ago. Yet it is a matter of deep interest to the Kremlin which, without any moral credit and without much material credit either, seems to be charting the cartography of another Cold War. (Remember, it pursued the last one from an impoverished base.) Mr. Obama’s pliancy on the matter will encourage them to think that we are, in this matter, a patsy.

And not only in this matter, alas: Mr. Obama is presiding over what might be called a withdrawalist moment in American foreign policy. Throughout his presidency, Mr. Obama has seemed strangely unmoved by the claims and values of American nationalism as they were expressed in most of the last century—for the rights of other peoples to establish nation-states after World War I, to free Europe and Asia from the bloody rule of monstrous fascist tyrannies in World War II, to defeat the egalitarian phantasm of communism as a civilized way of life. You might say that he dislikes the 20th century and refuses to accord the lessons of its bitter experiences any pride of place in his view of the world.

I don’t mean to say that the president is altogether against the use of force. In his counterterrorism policy he has been relentless. But his stewardship of the wars he inherited reveals a leader unsure of his beliefs, or else ruled by an almost cynical devotion to his own political survival.

In Afghanistan, Mr. Obama “surged”—it was, after all, the good war, support for which gave him political cover for his opposition to the war in Iraq, which was the bad war. But no sooner did the president escalate the war in Afghanistan than he was setting dates and orders for the troops’ withdrawal. And withdraw they will.

But if Mr. Obama wanted to wind down the war, why did he wind it up? Why did the dove dissemble as a hawk? After all, the notion that U.S. troops and the small number of NATO comrades have achieved anything lasting in battle is frivolous, and it is an insult added to pain for the administration to say anything else in order to comfort kin.

The president’s Afghan policy was divided against itself, and it puts one bitterly in mind of John’s Kerry’s warning about being “the last man to die for a mistake,” the words on which he impaled his own war, the war in Vietnam. And meanwhile in Iraq, the bad war, there are many reasons for (if you will pardon the expression) hope: Hard as it is for Democrats to admit, President Bush’s war in Iraq won a modicum of victories for democracy and pluralism in the Muslim world. And from that improving situation President Obama hastily fled.

The president is running for a second term. The Republican Party is having a different conversation. This leaves Mr. Obama free to abscond with the election without facing the issue of the real role of America in the world.

What exactly are his intentions, for example, about the threat of a nuclear Iran? It is, once again, hard to say. He told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that he is against containment, which is what he knew Aipac wanted to hear. But his false faith in the efficacy of sanctions and diplomacy will land him right in the lap of containment—unless he chooses force. Will he support Israel’s use of force? Will he use American force?

Where is an open mic when we need one? It is ironic that this president, who is committed to the programmatic pacification of Russian anxiety about defensive nuclear policy, has wasted more than three years in trying to talk with the regime of the ayatollahs about its craving for an offensive atomic capability.

More likely than not, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are already embarked on a scientific campaign to match Tehran’s not-all-that-hidden military accomplishments and ambitions. When these come close to maturing, President Obama’s cares about Russian missile anxieties will mean less than nothing.

Mr. Peretz was editor in chief of the New Republic from 1974 until 2011.

Martin Peretz: Wheres an Open Mic When We Really Need It? – WSJ.com.