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| Biden and Obama |
It would take a Voltaire to do justice to America’s meandering foreign policy. Voltaire is the satirist who penned Candide, or Optimism, 1759. Thomas Jefferson sported a bust of Voltaire near his writing desk at Monticello. It probably would not be a stretch to say that the hallowed founders of the American Republic were, like Voltaire, skeptical of politics and mistrustful of their nation’s foreign policy. None of them were optimists like poor suffering Candide. The message of Candide is that a false optimism may sometimes be more dangerous and threatening than frank but disturbing appraisals.
The United States, it is fair to say, will never enjoy a
rational foreign policy unless its leaders can agree that states which have
effectively shown the world by their deeds to be enemies – indeed boastful
enemies of the United States -- are treated, formally and informally, as
enemies of the United States. Iran is an enemy state that has put itself beyond
the reach of empathy. Therefore, the only sane foreign policy approach to Iran
must be one of armed skepticism. That skepticism was thrown to the winds by
former President Barrack Obama and his successor, President – but not for much
longer – Joe Biden.
The media has been bothering itself lately in an arcane
discussion of the “Biden legacy.” What Biden has left the future is: 1) a
destroyed southern border, 2) too many foreign policy mishaps to mention, 3) a
cumulative inflation rate of about 20 percent, 4) a post-progressive media that
only a mother could love, 5) an addition to the national debt of more than $6
trillion, and 6) tons of unseemly optimism, volubly expressed by Biden’s Vice
President Kamala Harris during her late losing presidential campaign.
I recently asked a Dunkin Donuts employee why she thought
Harris had lost to President-Elect Donald Trump by such alarming margins, and
she said simply, “Harris’ product didn’t sell, Trump’s did.” I told her, intending
a compliment, she should perhaps apply for a job at the New York Times as an
editorial writer. She said her present employment offered her better job
security. But she did appreciate Mark Twain’s quip: “Tell the truth always;
then you don’t have to remember what you said,” a typical failing of the
present – but not for long – President, whose mental acuity, the New York Times
only recently agreed, has been dangerously deficient.
Saudi Arabia is, as always, a question mark in the friend or
foe rankings. It was on the verge of recognizing Israeli claims of justifiable
sovereignty, but then Biden, remembering the hostility of Obama to both Saudi
Arabia and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, copied his contempt. Biden
also recalled Obama’s unjustifiable affection for Iran and withdrew sanctions
imposed by the prior administration, thought to be fascist by Neo-progressives
in the Democrat Party and major news
organizations.
As always, much of Western Europe continues to make positive
and friendly noises, France being less affectionate than, say, Britain, even as
Charles de Gaulle was less obliging to the US than was Winston Churchill in the
post war period. “The more things change,” The French say, “the more they
remain the same.”
That apothegm perfectly describes Biden’s truncated four year
presidency. Biden presented himself during his 2016 campaign as a somewhat
inaccessible experience-stuffed moderate Democrat. But when the masks were torn
off during his presidency, he governed for four years as a courageous
neo-progressive in the manner of an Obama. His was a plagiarized and updated
continuation of Obama’s eight year presidency. All of us skeptical realists
know from bitter experience that campaigning and governing are different and
sometimes unrelated activities.
Part of the problem with the Biden administration was that
its sons and daughters could not make a proper distinction between campaigning
and governing.
What should we make of President of Russia Vladimir Putin --
friend or foe?
Putin’s worst mistake in office was to turn East rather than
West, the historical posture of Russia since the reign of Peter the Great.
Peter the Great, we know from even a casual glance at
history, was the principal leader in Russia who replaced worn and medieval
social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific,
Westernized, and based on a preceding radical and reformist Enlightenment.
Feodor Dostoyevsky has much more in common with Charles
Dickens, whom he admired as a writer, than any little known Chinese communist
propaganda producer. None of the great leaders of Russia were eastern oriented
potentates. Ukraine has embarrassed Putin by turning to the West while he
pivoted to the East. Someone should send Putin a map of Russia and China. It
will show China stretched like the poisonous Chinese cobra along Russia’s soft
underbelly. The Russian people belong to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekov, all
Westerners. Chekov wrote many of his plays while in Crimea.
The so called “Chinese curse” – “May you live in interesting
times” – has been attributed by modern philologists not to the Chinese but to a
speech Joseph Chamberlain, the father of Neville Chamberlain, made in 1898: “I
think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. (Hear, hear.) I never remember myself a
time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new
objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety. (Hear, hear.)” But the expression falsely
attributed to the Chinese, we should not forget, remains a curse -- not a
blessing.
Those set against the West with daggers in their teeth
certainly are an interesting crew of cultural pirates. They are – and should be
– our declared enemies.
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