Canada after Obama, Glavin,
Atemptation to be vigorously resisted, perhaps especially at the worst of times, is the urge to pronounce that the American epoch is finally over, that the fat lady is singing, and that the United States, so recently the world’s sole superpower, is now just another country. Like Brazil, maybe, or Australia, but without the kangaroos.
That’s what you get when you follow the logic of the temptation to its most benign verdict. A harsher finding might be that the convulsions the bierkeller Republican demagogue Donald Trump has induced in the American presidential election campaign are symptomatic of a late- stage populist dementia and the United States is writhing in the death throes of fanaticism, bigotry and paranoia.
But let’s not get carried away. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton is a slightly sordid character, but so long as the cuddly socialist phenomenon Bernie Sanders comes in second and mobilizes his troops on Clinton’s behalf in a November showdown with Trump, the polls seem to suggest that the orange-faced swindler and billionaire celebrity rabble- rouser will surely lose.
And in any case the Republican ticket may yet go, not to Trump after all, but rather to the more electable Tea Party climate- change conspiracy theorist Ted Cruz, a dangerous far- right Christianist theocrat. So, you know, cheer up.
In any case, it would be wise for Canadians to a keep a respectable distance while the drama sorts itself out. The very least we should do is stop kidding ourselves about the elegant and glamorous Barack Obama.
It was all good fun last week in the pomp and gala of Justin Trudeau’s White House reception, the sumptuous baby lamp chops, the maple pecan cake and the roasted apricot galette, the women’s lovely dresses, the celebrities and the inevitable jokes about hockey and poutine. “Trudeau is less a Canadian prime minister and more a straight- up rock star,” Britain’s bourgeo is-left Guardian advises us. Like that’s a good thing. And it is all quite harmless, to a point, but the point is reached when press- corps etiquette and t he social graces require that certain indelicate subjects be overlooked.
The very day of Trudeau’s White House dinner, in the text of a not- unfriendly, 20,000- word presidential performance review published in the venerable Atl antic magazine, Obama revealed something of a depravity in an admission he made during a conversation with the eminent journalist Jeffrey Goldberg.
Obama said he was proud to have let Syrian war criminal Bashar Assad get away with deploying sarin gas in the mass murder of 1,400 civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, in August 2013. “I’m very proud of this moment,” Obama told Goldberg.
Sure, he’d declared that the use of poison gas was the one “red line” he wouldn’t let Assad cross. But to follow through and punish Assad would just have been to go along with “a playbook that comes out of the foreignpolicy establishment.” No matter what all his cabinet and senior advisers said, Obama knew better. American “credibility”? That’s just “the establishment” talking.
A mere eight months after Ghouta, having procured Assad’s immunity as Obama’s accomplice in a UN- overseen sarin gas retirement scheme, Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in the full knowledge that Obama’s word and American “credibility” counted for nothing. And here we are, 470,000 dead Syrian civilians later, five million Syrian refugees, and at least another six million officially counted as “internally displaced persons” inside Syria.
Europe is fraying at the s eams. Turkey’s at war with the Kurds. Yemen is in flames. After an enforced absence of more than 40 years, the Kremlin is back in the Middle East and this time it is on top. “Not since the Mongol invasions of the 13th century has the Middle East seen so much chaos” is the way Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy puts it.
When Putin moved into Syria last fall he claimed he was joining the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Instead, he immediately unleashed his bombers on a war- crimes rampage, slaughtering about 2,000 Syrian civilians and at least as many anti- ISIL, antiAssad resistance fighters. Obama sneered that Putin was walking into a “quagmire.” Just this week, Putin declared: mission accomplished.
Iran’s Khomeinists are renewing their intimacies with rogue states and ter- rorist groups like Hezbollah, not in spite of, but because of the slack Obama cut them in last year’s nuclear deal, and Iran is now violating UN resolutions in bravado test- firings of ballistic missiles. ISIL, that “junior varsity” outfit Obama dismissed before being shamed into leading a mostly- for-show coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” it, has since spun off 50 affiliates and franchises in more than 20 countries.
The number of countries now facing what U. S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper calls a “significant risk of instability” has grown by 59 this year. There are now more Sunni extremist groups ensconced in safe havens “than any time in history,” Clapper told Congress last month. Devin Nunes, chair of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said just one result is that the U.S. faces “the highest threat level since the 9/11 attacks.”
In his conversations with Goldberg, Obama complained about the“free riders” among American allies that are parsimonious about defence spending. He singled out Europe for failing to follow up in Libya, even though the Europeans had to drag him into the Libyan no- fly zone effort in the first place and the U.S. refused to join a small NATO troop- training effort that might have helped Libya’s post- Gadhafi government survive.
Donald Trump whines about “free riders” too, but why invest in an Americanled world order that not even the American president believes in any more? The Pax Americana enforced by the U.S. since 1946 is finished. It’s been shutdown by what Josef Joffe, a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has called “the most puzzling presidency since America’ s entry into the great- power system, circa 1917.”
With only a few months left in his two- term presidency Obama has finally come clean. He has revealed himself to be neither an idealist nor a foreign- policy “realist,” Joffe wrote in a followup Atlantic essay last week, but rather “an isolationist with drones and special-operations forces.”
Joffe is the author of The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics, Economics and a Half Century of False Prophecies, so he’s not some Cassandra doom saying America’ s imminent collapse. But Obama is in thrall of a kind of magical thinking, a strange faith that things will somehow turn in America’s favour, as if by miracles. “This is not grand strategy,” Joffe wrote. “It is religion.”
The United States is not finished as a world power, but it has abdicated as the world’s leading guarantor of global stability and defender of liberal democracy. We now know it didn’t happen by accident. Sooner or later, Canada is going to have to find its way in a world left behind by an Obama presidency distinguished by Kissingerian cynicism, a Nixonian capacity for selfdelusion and a swaggering self-regard.
The progressive torchpassing from Washington to Ottawa is mainly a vanity-mirror thing. Star- studded Rose Garden selfies notwithstanding, Canadians are going to have to reckon with the world as it is.
THE PROGRESSIVE TORCH-PASSING FROM WASHINGTON TO OTTAWA IS MAINLY A VANITY-MIRROR THING. — TERRY GLAVIN
THE UNITED STATES IS NOT FINISHED AS A WORLD POWER, BUT IT HAS ABDICATED AS THE WORLD’S LEADING GUARANTOR OF GLOBAL STABILITY AND DEFENDER OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY.