USA - It will take years if not decades to restore the trust of those which Obama has treated so cavalierly.

Obama and realism’s ignorance

by Michael Rubin

President Obama came into office promising to purge American foreign policy of the idealism that colored George W. Bush’s foreign policy. In 2008, Obama explained his vision to sympathetic pundit Fareed Zakaria, and recalled how, “tough, thoughtful, realistic diplomacy used to be a bipartisan hallmark of US foreign policy.” Obama then spelled out his goals:

And one of the things that I want to do, if I have the honor of being president, is to try to bring back the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan. But also characterized to a large degree — the first President Bush — with people like Scowcroft and Powell and Baker, who I think had a fairly clear-eyed view of how the world works…We need to show leadership through consensus and through pulling people together wherever we can. There are going to be times where we have to act unilaterally to protect our interests. And I always reserve the right to do that, should I be commander in chief.

In 2009, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne characterized Obama as a traditional realist. “On the whole,” he explained, “Obama is simply paying heed to Reinhold Niebuhr, a thinker admired both by the president and by conservatives. Niebuhr warned that some of ‘the greatest perils to democracy arise from the fanaticism of moral idealists who are not conscious of the corruption of self-interest.’”

Obama had promised to repair relations and “reboot America’s image around the world.” Five years on, let’s take stock. The American reputation in the Middle East is in tatters: The US-Saudi relationship, a pillar of American policy in the Middle East is in tatters. So too is America’s carefully cultivated relationship with Egypt. Israel—which has been far more of a boon to American interests than a liability—no longer trusts the United States. Nor does the United Arab Emirates.

The situation with Europe is no better. Obama bent over backwards to insult Great Britain, presumably acting upon a grudge based on its treatment of his Kenyan grandfather. Yesterday, the White House sought to assuage German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but its carefully parsed words did not deny that the US government had previously tapped the phone of a woman who grew up under the Stasi.

What Obama—and so many of his realist mentors—never understood is that calculating interests is not a sterile endeavor. His advisors counseled him to view the world through the filter of short-term interests, and he obliged. When it came to understanding alleged allied anger, he took his echo chamber seriously, and conflated polemic and truth.

Cultivating allies is like paying a mortgage: The reward comes years later, and it would be silly to walk away 29 years into a 30 year mortgage just because it’s hard to balance that last payment with the reboot image and buy a new car. In effect, Obama ignored the value of alliance and friendship paved over decades by predecessors.

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