A vote for Michelle Nunn is a vote for Harry Reid. A vote for Harry Reid is a vote to continue the destruction of the Senate, once considered the world's greatest debating society.
Now, even a handful of threatened Democrats are speaking out against Reid's dictatorial and tyrannical manner.
Reid and Pelsoi, as Kim Strassel points out, have sheltered Obama and protected Democrats from critical and embarrassing votes and, in the process, turned the Senate into a subservient body of wimps!
Strassel points out Boehner's threat, to sue Obama for over reach, follows on the heels of a 9 to 0 Supreme Court decision against Obama's unilateral action when it comes to presidential recess appointments claiming the Senate was not in session. Kim points out, Boehner's decision has an historical basis and, if successful,will benefit not only the nation as a whole but those in both parties as well. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
One has to assume voters intended to elect the first black president and not the first black dictator in the style of so many thugs who have destroyed nations in Africa.
Obama's double down response to what is going on was it is all a conspiracy by Republicans to disparage him.
Either Obama is deaf and needs a hearing aid or he is blind and needs a guide dog.
Or maybe he is neither and means to destroy our Constitutional protections and division of powers among the three branches.
The Supreme Court seems it is beginning to respond to is over reaching..
As for Hillary, her book tour has basically proven to be a flop and has exposed her vulnerabilities as a candidate.
Once again we see the phrase 'separation of powers' of a different kind. The Clintons' always profess being for the little guy but live in an entirely unrelated world of wealth.
As for Hillary - bless her poor - rich soul! (See 2 below.)
Meanwhile, flops of a bigger and more dangerous nature are fast becoming the legacy of Obama's foreign policy mishaps!
He sought for America to have a smaller world foot print and substituted it by drawing worthless red lines in the sand.
Now America is shoe-less and Obama remains clueless! (See 3 and 3a below.)
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I continue to warn about Jordan! (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) All the President's Enablers
By Kim Strassel
Congressional Democrats profess themselves scandalized that Speaker John Boehner will sue President Obama on behalf of the House. The only scandal is that congressional Democrats allowed it to come to this.
Mr. Obama does bear responsibility for an "aggressive unilateralism"—as Mr. Boehner puts it—that has stripped legislators of their constitutional role. But he has been indulged in his every excess by legislators of his own party. Call it wimpy, call it the Stockholm syndrome, call it what it is: Congressional Democrats watch supinely as the president treads on their powers. Separate branch of government? Who, us?
Call it too another disturbing reality of the Obama era. In the history of this country, there was one thing on which Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, could regularly agree: Nobody messes with Congress's powers. Political parties were happy to rally votes for a president's agenda, to slam his opponents, to excuse his failings. But should that president step on Congress's size 12 toes, all partisan bets were off.
Andrew Johnson was impeached by nearly two-thirds of the House for the "high crimes and misdemeanors" of violating a controversial law that the House had passed. Theodore Roosevelt's regulatory reaches were bitterly opposed by conservatives in his party. The Republican speaker, Joseph Gurney Cannon, famously complained of the Rough Rider: "That fellow at the other end of the avenue wants everything from the birth of Christ to the death of the devil." When FDR announced his court-packing plan, it was a Democrat, Henry Ashurst, who labeled it a "prelude to tyranny" and delayed the bill in the Senate for 165 days, contributing to its defeat.
This institutional cantankerousness was alive and well through the Bush era. In May 2006, the FBI raided the office of then-Democratic Rep. William Jefferson. Republican Speaker Denny Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a blistering joint statement denouncing it as a violation of the separation of powers. Republicans and Democrats spent much of the Bush years jointly attempting to force the president to give Congress more say in his wars and detention policies.
Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi on Capitol Hill in April. Associated Press
Scholars can and do argue over the constitutional merits of these episodes. What's clear is a long history of Congress vigorously slapping back at any intrusion on its perceived powers. Indeed, congressional touchiness has encouraged White Houses throughout U.S. history to think carefully about what powers to exercise.
Mr. Obama has not needed to think, carefully or otherwise. Name a prominent Democrat—name any Democrat—who has said boo about the president's 23 unilateral rewrites of ObamaCare. Or of immigration law. Name any who today are defending constituents in their districts against the abuses of the Obama IRS. A few congressional Democrats got their backs up with the White House over possible Syria action, but they are dwarfed by the majority who've gone silent over Mr. Obama's national-security policies—which they once berated George W. Bush for pursuing as an "imperial" president.
The main culprits here are Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Ms. Pelosi, who've put themselves and their caucuses at the disposal of the White House. Winning political battles—sticking it to the GOP—is their priority, not constitutional balance. Mr. Reid has made himself White House gatekeeper, sitting on thorny votes, earning Congress public scorn for dysfunction. His members are meanwhile happy for Mr. Obama to pervert the law, since it saves them taking tough votes.
It hasn't helped that much of the institutional memory of the Democratic Party has retired or died this past decade. Nearly half of today's Democratic Senate was elected with or since Mr. Obama and has never known institutional leadership.
West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd —onetime Senate majority leader and fierce defender of congressional power—would have laid down on train tracks to protest Mr. Obama's recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess. The current Senate Democrats cheered the president on. It was left to Republicans and a unanimous Supreme Court on Thursday to restore the Senate's constitutional rights.
Yet it is probably asking too much of Senate Democrats to protest the president's diminution of their powers when they won't protest Mr. Reid's. Alaska's Mark Begich has yet to have a vote on a single one of his amendments in six years. Louisiana's Mary Landrieu now runs the "powerful" Senate Energy Committee, but as Mr. Reid has neutered committees, she has as much luck getting a vote on the Keystone XL pipeline as she does if she were running the Senate cafeteria. The majority leader last year stripped the Senate of filibuster powers. The Obama senators cheered the dismantling of their institutional power.
Mr. Boehner's lawsuit was put down by some as a cynical attempt to rally his midterm voters. What this misses is that the Boehner lawsuit, if successful, would reassert the rights of all members of Congress—regardless of party, position or president in power. Democrats might consider thanking him for doing their job.
1a) Senate 9, President 0
Obama pitches a shutout at the Supreme Court on recess appointments.
The Supreme Court handed President Obama his 13th unanimous loss in two years on Thursday, and this one may be the most consequential. All nine Justices voted to overturn Mr. Obama's non-recess recess appointments as an unconstitutional abuse of power.
Over nearly 238 years of American history, the Supreme Court has never had to review the President's authority to temporarily fill vacant executive offices when Congress is adjourned. Mr. Obama's 2012 maneuver to void the Senate's advice and consent role triggered a judicial intercession, and defeats at the High Court are seldom as total as this one.
Two years ago Mr. Obama packed the National Labor Relations Board with three new members and made Richard Cordray the chief of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Other Presidents have made such appointments and we've long supported that authority—as long as they are made when Congress is genuinely in recess.
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UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo on the Supreme Court ruling in NLRB v. Noel Canning. Photo credit: Getty Images.
But in this case the Senate was conducting pro forma proceedings (gavel in, gavel out, every three days) because neither chamber can adjourn without the other's permission under Article I, Section 5. The House refused to consent to prevent Mr. Obama from making recess appointments, so he simply assumed the power to define on his own when a coequal branch of government is at work.
On this invention, the President could presumably make recess appointments overnight or during a lunch break, but Mr. Obama's provocation was deliberate. "I refuse to take no for an answer," he justified his behavior at a campaign event the day after the appointments. Democrats ran the Senate then and run it now. Mr. Obama merely thought the normal confirmation checks and balances too frustrating and preferred to install his union appointees without a debate.
He should have read the Recess Appointments Clause before Justice Stephen Breyerdid it for him. In Noel Canning v. NLRB, a Washington state soda bottler challenged a board decision on grounds that the recess appointments were null and thus the board lacked the three-member quorum to do business. Because the Constitution delegates power to each branch to independently make their own rules, writes Justice Breyer, "the Senate is in session when it says it is."
AFP/Getty Images
Justice Breyer surveys the legal theories and evolution over time of recesses and recess appointments since the Federalist Papers. This exception to advice and consent was necessary because Members of the early Congresses were out of town for months at a time, while the executive branch was so small that a few job openings could shut down the government. In the 20th century, recess appointments became more common even as their original purpose disappeared.
Deferring to this historical practice, Justice Breyer arrives at a pragmatic test: The President may fill vacancies when the Senate has not transacted business for 10 days or more, whether within or between Congress's two year-long formal sessions.
The Constitution lacks any such 10-day clause, and it is troubling that Justice Breyer seems to have invented it on his own. But still his invention narrows the recess power. And had Justice Anthony Kennedy flipped and joined the four conservatives, recess appointments would have been diminished even more.
In a concurrence with the judgment only, Justice Antonin Scalia makes a stricter reading of the Constitution's language about "vacancies that may happen during the recess." His interpretation would limit recess appointments to only the break between formal sessions and only for positions that open during that window. Justice Breyer "casts aside the plain, original meaning of the constitutional text in deference to late-arising historical practices that are ambiguous at best," he writes.
We admire Justice Scalia's originalism, but the clause is ambiguous; Thomas Jefferson puzzled over its meaning as early as 1802. But Justice Scalia's reasoning shows why Mr. Obama's gambit was so reckless. "Friction between the branches is an inevitable consequence of our constitutional structure," Justice Breyer instructs, and the legislature and executive are supposed to work things out along the way. By violating these norms, Mr. Obama invited the judiciary to mediate and jeopardized the recess power for all future Presidents.
The Framers did not vest the executive with the unilateral appointment authority that Mr. Obama thinks he is entitled to. They wanted to diffuse power across the federal government to protect individual liberty. Wilfully bypassing advice and consent also subverts political accountability, which a former constitutional law professor ought to know.
Mr. Obama has thus strengthened the Senate, now armed with a judicial guide to preventing recess appointments: Presidents must take no for an answer. The ruling also opens to challenge some 436 decisions that the NRLB issued while the imposter members were seated.
But the true import of Noel Canning is that even liberal Justices are alarmed that Mr. Obama's executive law-making is visiting real damage on the Constitution. This will not be the last legal torpedo aimed at the hull of his increasingly willful Presidency.
1b) No one has done more to protect Senate Democrats from difficult votes than Majority Leader Harry Reid, but a funny thing is happening as another election nears. His own vulnerable Members are griping about the lack of votes.
Alaska Sen. Mark Begich was elected in 2008 and hasn't been able to get a Senate vote on any of his proposed legislative amendments. For years he was silent but suddenly he's upset, telling Politico: "Does it mean increased risks? Sure. That's what voting is about." West Virginia's Joe Manchin complained to the Hill newspaper: "I've never been in a less productive time in my life than I am right now, in the United States Senate."
They're right about the numbers. Wyoming Republican John Barrasso recently noted on the floor that Senate Democrats proposed 676 amendments in the last year but were allowed votes on all of seven. Republicans proposed 812 and got votes on 11. Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee has been allowed twice as many amendment votes (15) in the Republican House in the last year than Mr. Reid has allowed his entire Senate caucus. Not one of the nine Senate Democrats elected in 2012 has been granted a floor vote on any of their amendments.
All of this has been central to Mr. Reid's strategy of ducking debates on issues or House legislation that might have a chance of passing and getting to President Obama's desk. That's helped the White House, but Democrats running for re-election are now having to explain why they even want to return to Washington if they can't even vote on the Keystone XL pipeline, reforming ObamaCare, or anything else. In a few months they may wish they had revolted sooner.
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2) Hillary Clinton, for Richer or Poorer
Her book tour exposes forgotten vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
By Peggy Noonan
News is surprise. The news out of Hillary Clinton's book tour is that it hasn't gone well. It was supposed to establish her iconic position in American political life while solidifying her inevitability. Instead it exposed vulnerabilities. The media was neither at her feet nor at her throat but largely distanced, which was interesting. Her claim that the Clintons were "dead broke" when they left the White House inspired widespread derision. Her exchanges on Benghazi didn't bury the issue but kept it alive.
The scripted answers were tiring. The old trick of answering the question you wish you'd been asked instead of the one you were is weary to the point of antique. So is her tendency to filibuster. On Wednesday she almost committed candor in an interview with PBS's Gwen Ifill. Ms. Ifill was teasing her out on the presidency. Hillary, with a look of good humor, said that frankly, "you have to be a little bit crazy to run for president . . . so totally immersed, and so convinced that you can bring something to that office"—and then she caught herself, mid-honesty, and lapsed into a long, fatuous aria about how she sees the people and they tell her of their struggles.
It was sad. She was almost interesting! Her tendency to check herself comes across more as a tic she can't control than an attempt to maintain discretion.
The book was almost uniformly panned. Sales were disappointing, falling a reported 44% in the second week, which means word of mouth wasn't good. To top it off, the Wall Street Journal and NBC released a poll taken at the height of the tour that said while 55% of Americans find her knowledgeable and experienced enough to be president, less than half consider her honest and straightforward.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrives to sign copies of her book 'Hard Choices' at a Barnes & Noble book store in Los Angeles. Reuters
But the tour yielded three positives. Mrs. Clinton put away the issue, if it was an issue, of age. She has sufficient energy, brightness and hustle to banter and parry with interviewers and audiences in a lengthy major national tour. There is nothing wrong with her brain. In fact, she changed the way you see her when you think about her. Twenty-two years ago, when she first arrived on the national scene, she was the brittle harridan in the headband, the high-ticket attorney who wasn't gonna be bakin' no cookies. That image has changed over the years, but during the tour the change became definitive. Now she's Mom—mature, settled, with a throaty laugh and a thickening middle. Or grandma. After six years of presidential leadership from a lithe, supple, snotty older brother, Mom will seem an improvement.
Mrs. Clinton also re-established the fact of her experience, eight years a U.S. senator and four as secretary of state. She wanted to remind us, and did, that her professional résumé is superior to that of the incumbent and his predecessor. And she was interesting and believable when she said women in politics have it tougher than men, that they come under stranger scrutiny, are subjected to greater demands and more outrageous insults. This is true, and there isn't a Republican congresswoman who wouldn't give you an earful on it.
As to the vulnerabilities made more obvious by the tour, the talk of Mrs. Clinton's wealth, which followed her protestations of near-destitution when she left the White House, reminded people of the Bonnie and Clyde factor. The Clintons now hold a place of high respect and stature. But before they were Eleanor and Franklin they were viewed by their critics, and not only their critics, as Bonnie and Clyde. Most of their scandals were about money—from luckily timed cattle-future investments to Whitewater to campaign-financing lapses to last-minute pardons for donors to "renting out" the Lincoln bedroom, and more.
Mrs Clinton seems to have a peculiar and unattractive relationship with money. She wants it and she doesn't want you to know. She also appears to think she's entitled to it, as a public servant who operated at high levels. But public servants now are less like servants than bosses.
When an interviewer compared her to Mitt Romney in terms of wealth, she got a stony look. That is a "false equivalency," she said. You could see she feels she should not be compared to a wealthy Republican because she's liberal and therefore stands for the little guy. So she can be rich and should not be criticized, while rich people who have the wrong policies—that would be Republicans—are "the rich" and can be scored and shamed. This is seen by some as hypocrisy but is more like smugness.
It is Mrs. Clinton's habit to fake identification with people who've had real struggles by claiming she's had them too. All humans have struggles, but hers were not material. She came from a solidly suburban upper-middle-class home, glided into elite schools, became a lawyer, married a politician who quickly rose, enjoyed all the many perks of a governor's mansion and then the White House, and then all the perks of a senator, secretary of state and former first lady. She's been driven in limousines and official cars almost all her adult life. For more than a quarter-century she has seen America through tinted windows.
Newly out of the Ivy League, she asked for political power instead of financial power. Many of her generation of liberal activists, with similar bona fides, chose the latter. She married and became a politician and accrued great power and fame.
But she still wanted the money. Through speeches, appearances, books and investments, she got it. Bill seems happy with it. She sees a disjunction between her acquisitive streak and her party's demonization of acquisitive streaks, and so she claims she was broke, at the mercy of forces, an orphan in the storm, instead of an operator of considerable hunger and skill.
All this has made her look silly and phony. One wonders what she thinks of the base of her party that she can't knock it off.
As for the book, it is actually the first I have encountered that was written so a politician could say, "I wrote about this at length in my book." It exists to offer a template for various narratives and allow her to suggest she's already well covered the issue at hand, which the interviewer would know if he were better informed.
It is written in the style of the current Ladies' Home Journal in that it patronizes even as it panders. It is an extended attempt to speak "their language," the language of a huge imagined audience of women. There are silver linings of defeat. She brims with ideas, advocates, gets to yes, chooses her own team. There are clear-eyed assessments and daunting challenges. The State Department neighborhood is known as "Foggy Bottom." She proudly quotes a speech she gave in 2008. "You will always find me on the front lines of democracy—fighting for the future."
Ladies and gentleman, that is the authentic sound of 2016. Shoot me now.
Why do Democratic politicians talk like this about themselves, putting themselves and their drama at the ego-filled center, instead of policy ideas, larger meanings, the actual state of the country? In this she is just like Barack Obama.
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3) Obama's Foreign-Policy Failures Go Far Beyond Iraq
Retreat abroad and bigger government at home has made the U.S. weaker.
'What would America fight for?" asked a cover story last month in the Economist magazine. Coming from a British publication, the headline has a tone of "let's you and him fight." But its main flaw is that it greatly oversimplifies the question of how the U.S. can recover from its willful failure to exert a positive influence over world events.
That failure is very much on display as Iraq disintegrates and Russia revives the "salami tactics" of 1930s aggressors, slicing off parts of Ukraine. Both disasters could have been avoided through the exercise of more farsighted and muscular American diplomacy. A show of greater capability to manage "domestic" policy would have aided this effort.
The U.S. is still militarily powerful and has a world-wide apparatus of trained professionals executing its policies, overt and covert. It has an influential civil society and a host of nongovernmental organizations with influence throughout the planet, not always but mostly for the better. It has a preponderance of multinational corporations. Although confidence in America has waned significantly, it is still looked to for leadership in thwarting the designs of thugs like Russia's Vladimir Putin, Syria's Bashar Assad and Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei.
Yet President Obama has followed a deliberate policy of disengagement from the world's quarrels. He failed to bluff Assad with his "red line" threat and then turned the Syrian bloodbath over to Mr. Putin, showing a weakness that no doubt emboldened the Russian president to launch his aggression against Ukraine. The errant Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, beset by a Sunni-al Qaeda insurgency, has been told, in effect, to seek succor from his Shiite co-religionists in Iran. Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry amazingly urges America's only real friends in the area, the Iraqi Kurds, not to abandon the ill-mannered Mr. Maliki in favor of greater independence and expanded commerce (mainly oil) with our NATO ally, Turkey.
Mr. Obama cites opinion polls purportedly showing that Americans are "war weary." Probably what the polls really reflect is something else entirely, dismay at the wasted blood and treasure that resulted from Mr. Obama's unilateral declaration of defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead of whining about "war weariness," an American president should understand his historical role. The U.S. can't just withdraw from the responsibilities that have derived from its enormous success in making itself the look-to nation for peoples aspiring to safer, freer and more prosperous lives. The costs of failure are too high, as we have seen in the many thousands of lives lost in Syria.
U.S. policy will continue to be measured not only by its willingness to fight but by how effectively it moves to counter troublemakers before trouble happens. An effective president would call a halt to U.S. disarmament, rather than citing it as an accomplishment. He would move to strengthen the hands of America's friends, like the new Ukrainian government and the Kurds of the Middle East, by providing them with economic and military aid. He would abandon the disastrous policy of trying to schmooze and appease cutthroats like Vladimir Putin.
Although it might seem too much to ask, an effective president would say to the world that the American politico-economic system still works. That means acknowledging not only today's private-sector achievements, like the boom in domestic natural-gas and oil production due to homegrown technological advancements, but history's lessons as well. In World War II, America quickly became the "Arsenal of Democracy." Its great war machine was created by the inventive know-how and productive skills of millions of private citizens who for generations before the war had seized the opportunities available in a free-market economy to build large mass-production business organizations.
At its best, foreign policy is the sum total of how a nation presents itself to the world's peoples. That includes its quality of life and standard of living, its know-how in producing goods and services, its organizational skills, its cultural and economic creativity. All those things say, "Look at us. You can be happier and healthier if you follow our lead."
The American image has been tarnished by the progressives who took control of the U.S. government in 2009. They set about to expand the state's power, which was exactly what had destroyed the productive drive and creative skills of the post-World War II Russians and Chinese. They made a hash of health insurance, grossly distorted finance and destroyed personal savings by manipulation of the credit markets. They conducted a war on fossil fuels, handing a victory to Russia, which uses its hydrocarbon exports to exercise political influence in Europe. They weakened the dollar by running up huge national debts and wasted the nation's substance on silly projects like "fighting global warming."
U.S. interests in the Middle East, Asia and Europe are threatened as aggressors and terrorists become bolder. An American president doesn't have to sit back and watch. The Economist asked a mischievous question, but it revealed a disappointment of the world's expectations of America.
Mr. Melloan, a former columnist and deputy editor of the Journal editorial page, is the author of "The Great Money Binge: Spending Our Way to Socialism" (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
3a) Obama's World Disorder
Amid all the talk of the isolationism that supposedly characterizes the Obama administration’s foreign policy, we forget that since World War II, the global order has largely been determined by U.S. engagement. The historically rare state of prosperity and peace that defined the postwar world were due to past U.S. vigilance and sacrifice.
Germany in the last 150 years has been at the center of three European wars, winning one, losing another, and destroying much of Europe and itself in the third.
Yet present-day Germany has the largest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. It is a global leader in high technology and industrial craftsmanship. For seventy years Germany, even after its second historic unification in 1989, has not translated such economic preeminence into military power, much less aggression. In fact, the strategic status quo of postwar Europe—with Britain and France, and their relatively smaller and weaker economies, as the continent’s two sole nuclear powers—remains mostly unquestioned.
Yet present-day Germany has the largest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. It is a global leader in high technology and industrial craftsmanship. For seventy years Germany, even after its second historic unification in 1989, has not translated such economic preeminence into military power, much less aggression. In fact, the strategic status quo of postwar Europe—with Britain and France, and their relatively smaller and weaker economies, as the continent’s two sole nuclear powers—remains mostly unquestioned.
Image credit: Zoriah
That strange fact is due almost entirely to the U.S.-led NATO’s determination to protect the Eastern flank of Europe from potential enemies, to reassure Germany that it need not rearm to enjoy pan-European influence, and to quietly support the European nuclear monopolies of Britain and France. While the U.S. has always talked up the American-inspired United Nations, its first allegiance has always been to assure liberal democratic states in Europe of unshakeable American support. Any weakening of the latter might send Europe back into the tumultuous twentieth century.
A similar paradox exists in Asia. Pakistan and North Korea are two of the weakest economies and most unstable political systems in the region. Yet both nations are nuclear—despite rather than because of U.S.-led efforts at nonproliferation. In comparison, by any logical measure, far wealthier and more sophisticated states like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and perhaps the Philippines should all be nuclear, given their expertise, dangerous locales, and the looming shadows of three proud, and sometime aggressive nations—China, India, and Russia—in their midst. Yet none have. That fact too is largely because of American security guarantees.
Why, then, has the Obama administration sought to negotiate nuclear arms reduction agreements solely with the Russians? The latter does not have any responsibilities resembling the host of American dependents and clients in Asia and Europe that could become nuclear, but choose not to, only because of U.S. guarantees of their strategic security.
Economically successful but non-nuclear Asian nations claim a portion of the U.S. deterrent force as critical to their own survival. Any failure to reassure our Asian and Pacific partners that our own nuclear forces are pledged to their survival would lead to a sizable increase in the world’s nuclear family.
In addition to protecting postwar Europe and the Pacific, the United States has traditionally sided with historically persecuted and vulnerable peoples, who, in the calculations of realpolitik, might not otherwise warrant such staunch friendship. U.S. security guarantees to Israel—a mere 7 million people, until recently without oil reserves, and surrounded by a host of more numerous and oil-wealthy enemies—for a half-century have assured the viability of the Jewish state.
For all the present acrimony over the Iraq War, we forget that one dividend was the emergence of a semi-autonomous and largely constitutional Kurdistan of some 7 million people, whose recent tragic history had been one of ethnic cleansing, gassing, and slaughter. Only prior liberation by and current support from America keep viable the small landlocked province.
The same is largely true of Taiwan. While the current security guarantees accorded Taiwan by the U.S. are nebulous, even such uncertainty for now continues to keep Taiwan autonomous amid constant Chinese pressure. Also consider tiny Greece, a country that has been alternately friendly and hostile to the United States. But its long unhappy history is a testament to the dangerous neighborhood of this country of 12 million inhabitants: the turmoil of the Arab spring is to its south, an ascendant Islamist and neo-Ottoman Turkey are to the east, and the ethnic powder keg in the Balkans lie to the North, capped by understandably unsympathetic European Union creditors. Only Greece’s NATO membership—a euphemism for an omnipresent American 6th fleet—has offered the Greek people both security and the opportunity to chafe at its dependence on U.S. arms.
In fact, there are a host of tiny moderate nations, which, while not formally allied with the U.S., count on American friendship in extremis, from Jordan and Kuwait to Chile and Colombia. Any American recessional puts at risk all such vulnerable states. The Obama administration’s policy of forcing concessions from the Israelis, pulling out all constabulary troops from an unstable postwar Iraq, and cozying up to an increasingly absolutist and Islamist Turkey makes no sense.
Then there is the rogue’s gallery. Just as Rome once put down nationalists, insurrectionists, and challengers of the Pax Romana, such as Ariovistus, Boudicca, Cleopatra, Jugurtha, Mithridates, Vercingetorix, and Zenobia, so too the United States has gone after state and non-state enemies of the postwar system, both during and after the Cold War. Sometimes authoritarians sent their armies across national borders or were guilty of genocide; at other times, unhinged nation-states and free-lancing zealots sponsored or committed acts of international terrorism. In response, the U.S.—sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much—has gone to war or at least gone after the likes of Moammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, Ho Chi Minh, Manuel Noriega, Kim Il-sung, and the Taliban. Like it or not, only the United States can prevent the theocracy in Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the Assad dictatorship from gassing its own people, or al Qaeda from staging another 9/11 attack.
The United States offered resistance to illiberal and autocratic regional powers that have at time challenged the protocols of the postwar order. And that pushback has allowed weaker nations—such as Poland or the Baltic States—to escape the orbit of post-Soviet Russia, while in the Pacific ensuring that an Australia, New Zealand, or the Philippines is not bullied into subservience by China
This strange postwar world ushered in the greatest advancement in prosperity amid the general absence of a cataclysmic world conflagration or continental war since the dawn of civilization. For the first time since the rise of the Greek city-state, most nations have been able both to prosper and to assume that their boundaries were inviolate and their populations mostly free from attack. A system of international communications, travel, commerce, and trade is predicated on the assumption that pirates cannot seize cargo ships, terrorists cannot hijack planes, and rogue nations cannot let off atomic bombs without a U.S. led coalition to stop them from threatening the international order.
For the U.S. to continue this exceptional role of preserving the postwar system in times of economic weakness and spiritual exhaustion, it is critical for the Obama administration to articulate to the American people exactly what the United States has accomplished, how the postwar order arose, and what precisely are the benefits that justify such enormous sacrifices in blood and treasure.
Unfortunately, it has not offered systematic defense of the world order it inherited. For all the grand talk of working with the United Nations, the Obama administration ignored it in Syria, vastly exceeded its no-fly-zone and humanitarian aid resolutions in Libya, and misled it when it asserted to the General Assembly that a video-maker had prompted the violence against U.S. facilities in Benghazi. Moreover, Obama’s foreign policy team has serially faulted the prior administration as unilateral, forgetting that it obtained UN resolutions to retaliate in Afghanistan, tried desperately to obtain them for the Iraq invasion, and then assembled a large and diverse group of allies.
The Obama administration’s reset with Russia paid no attention to our Eastern European friends, who were eager to work with America on missile defense and integration within the West. It also ignored that reset essentially undid the punishments accorded Vladimir Putin for his 2008 invasion of Georgia. Meanwhile, China is angry and confused that the U.S. suddenly warns it to behave in the Pacific, after turning a blind eye for five years as it bullied most of its neighbors.
After assembling a coalition to beef up sanctions again Iran, the U.S. eased them to begin new negotiations with the theocracy—without prior consultation with our allies. The Obama administration has gone after al Qaedists through drone attacks, but such terrorists have spread throughout the Mideast in the wake of U.S. retrenchment and a misguided and euphemistic outreach to radical Islam.
No one in Latin America knows to what degree, if any, the U.S. opposes the creeping spread of authoritarian Marxist governments. No one in the Middle East knows quite what the evolving American position is on Iranian nuclear proliferation. And no one quite knows whether the United States is distancing itself from Israel while gravitating toward its enemies.
The Obama administration declares climate change the chief global threat. That new inanimate target is welcome news to aggressive nations that had once feared that their own reckless behavior might have been so singled out.
Americans did not fully appreciate the costly postwar global order that the United States had established over the last seventy years. Maybe they will start to as they witness it vanish.
4)
| ISIS' IMPACT, INFLUENCE SPREADING TO JORDAN? | |
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One of the more concerning elements of the recent rise of the extremist group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is the possibility that its influence and control may spread to Jordan. ISIS has gained traction in Syria and Iraq, but were it to establish a presence in Jordan, a country that has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1994, this would likely cause alarm in the Jewish state.
Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Israel Ziv, the former head of the Israel Defense Forces Operations branch, noted that instability in Jordan, which is bordered by Syria on the north and Iraq on the east, is a major security concern to Israel. "Jordan has the longest border with Israel. For Israel, any change or real threat that puts Jordan in instability has a direct effect on Israel," he explained.
Ziv also noted that 2,000-3,000 Jordanian jihadists have recently returned home after fighting with extremists in Syria. "They did not come (to Syria) to vacation or retire there," he said. "They came over there in order to prepare the ground for the next stage, which is part of ISIS ideology."
While Jordan regularly consults with both the US and Israel, the Israeli news service Ynet News reported Wednesday that military cooperation with Israel has increased in light of ISIS gains. "There is a very good cooperation between us regarding ISIS' growing presence in Iraq and Syria, but also on issues relating to other radical forces in the Middle East which have their sights set on Israel and Jordan," a Jordanian source told Ynet.
The threat that ISIS poses to Jordan's stability is obviously of significant concern to Israel, and monitoring the situation remains a priority as developments unfold, Update will continue to educate readers on the impact these changing events can have on Israel's safety and security as well as on the interests of our own country.
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