Charles Krauthammer / We are seeing the collapse of Obama’s foreign policy - pressofAtlanticCity.com: Commentary

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Charles Krauthammer / We are seeing the collapse of Obama’s foreign policy

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Posted: Sunday, September 23, 2012 12:01 am

Charles Krauthammer / We are seeing the collapse of Obama’s foreign policy

In the week following 9/11/12, something big happened: the collapse of the Cairo Doctrine, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's foreign policy. It was to reset the very course of post-9/11 America, creating a profound rapprochement with the Islamic world.

On June 4, 2009, in Cairo, Obama promised "a new beginning" offering Muslims "mutual respect," unsubtly implying previous disrespect. Curious, as over the previous 20 years, America had six times committed its military forces on behalf of oppressed Muslims, three times for reasons of pure humanitarianism (Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo).

No matter. Obama had come to remonstrate and restrain the hyperpower that, by his telling, had lost its way after 9/11, creating Guantanamo, practicing torture, imposing its will with arrogance.

First, he would cleanse by confession. Then he would heal. And his policies of accommodation and concession would consolidate the gains: an outstretched hand to Iran's mullahs, a first-time presidential admission of the U.S. role in a 1953 coup, a studied and stunning turning away from the Green Revolution; withdrawal from Iraq with no residual presence ; a fixed timetable for leaving Afghanistan; returning our ambassador to Damascus (with kind words for Bashar al-Assad - "a reformer," suggested the secretary of state); deliberately creating distance between the U.S. and Israel.

These measures would raise our standing in the region, restore respect for the United States and elicit cooperation from Muslim lands.

It's now three years since the Cairo speech. The Islamic world is convulsed with an explosion of anti-Americanism. From Tunisia to Lebanon, American schools, businesses and diplomatic facilities set ablaze. A U.S. ambassador and three others murdered. The flag of Salafism, of which al-Qaeda is a prominent element, raised over our embassies in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Sudan.

The administration blames it all on a 14-minute trailer for a film no one has seen and may not even exist. What else can it say? Admit that its doctrinal premises were supremely naive and its policies deeply corrosive to American influence?

Religious provocations are endless. (Ask Salman Rushdie.) Resentment about the five-century decline of the Islamic world is a constant. What's new is the unmistakable sound of a superpower in retreat. Ever since Henry Kissinger flipped Egypt from the Soviet to the American camp in the early 1970s, the U.S. had dominated the region. No longer.

"It's time," declared Obama to wild applause at his convention, "to do some nation-building right here at home." He'd already announced a strategic pivot from the Middle East to the Pacific. Made possible because "the tide of war is receding."

Nonsense. From the massacres in Nigeria to the charnel house that is Syria, violence has, if anything, increased. What is receding is Obama's America.

It's as axiomatic in statecraft as in physics: Nature abhors a vacuum. Islamists rush in to fill the space. America's friends are bereft, confused, paralyzed.

Islamists rise across North Africa from Mali to Egypt. Iran repeatedly defies U.S. demands on nuclear enrichment, then, as a measure of its contempt for what America thinks, openly admits that its Revolutionary Guards are deployed in Syria. Russia, after arming Assad, warns America to stay out, while the secretary of state delivers vapid lectures about Assad "meeting" his international "obligations." The Gulf States beg America to act on Iran; Obama strains mightily to restrain ... Israel.

Sovereign U.S. territory is breached and U.S. interests are burned. And what is the official response? One administration denunciation after another - of a movie trailer! A request to Google to "review" the trailer's presence on YouTube. And a sheriff's deputies' midnight "voluntary interview" with the suspected filmmaker. This in the land of the First Amendment.

What else can Obama do? At their convention, Democrats congratulated themselves on their one foreign policy success: killing Osama bin Laden. A week later, the Salafist flag flies over four American embassies as the mob chants, "Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas."

A foreign policy in epic collapse. And, by the way, Vladimir Putin just expelled USAID from Russia. Another thank you from a recipient of a grand Obama "reset."

Email Charles Krauthammer at

letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

Posted in on Sunday, September 23, 2012 12:01 am.

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