May 5, 2014 | National Post

The Troubling Rise of American ‘Withdrawalism’

Eastern Ukraine is falling to pieces. Suicide bombings remain epidemic in Iraq. Much of eastern Syria now is controlled by an al-Qaeda spin-off group that calls itself “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.” Bashar Assad is bombarding Syrian civilians with chlorine gas. The nations of the Persian Gulf are quietly preparing to defend themselves against a nuclear Iran. The Western-financed Palestinian Authority regime in the West Bank has allied itself openly with Hamas terrorists in Gaza. And Egypt is ruled by an autocratic junta that responds to crisis by arresting its enemies en masse, and sentencing them to death.

In some areas of the world, it is an emboldened Moscow that is causing trouble. In the South China Sea, it is Beijing. In parts of the Middle East, Islamists are on the rise. In other parts, they have been crushed. Yet one theme is common to all these theatres: Regional powers, local rogues and terrorist groups alike are aggressively flexing their muscles with new confidence — because the threat of U.S. military intervention is becoming increasingly remote. It is not quite a return to 1930s-style “isolationism” under Barack Obama. Rather, the process of American retreat since the end of the Iraq War is something more subtle. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, has dubbed it “withdrawalism.”

“Every single aspect of his foreign policy is affected by [the experience of] being spooked by Iraq,” Mr. Wieseltier told the crowd at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ 2014 Washington Forum last Thursday. “And so now [his] foreign policy consists of ‘reassuring’ people” — from Japan (against the Chinese threat) to Ukraine (against Russia) to America’s allies in the Middle East (against Iran). But these reassurances, Wieseltier convincingly argues, ring hollow — because they no longer seem to be backstopped by anything beyond economic sanctions.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies is a somewhat hawkish policy institute, with a strong focus on confronting terrorism and militant Islam. But at Thursday’s Forum in Washington, D.C., titled The Middle East in Transition: Allies, Adversaries and Enemies, Mr. Wieseltier’s theme was echoed by a variety of mainstream speakers. Bard College professor Walter Russell Mead, who accompanied Mr. Wieseltier on a panel entitled America and the World 13 Years After 9/11, told the crowd that, though he gives no credence to conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama being some sort of “secret Muslim, Kenyan socialist,” he does view the U.S President as “a centralizing liberal who believes that the right technique can solve all sorts of problems,” and that “there a spontaneous[ly realizable] and benign balance of power that is set to asserts itself in the world if the United States lowers its international profile.”

“The entire world order is based on the presumption of American willingness to use force,” added renowned Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan. “But Obama doesn’t like the use of force. And this [fact] also prevents [the United States] from taking steps short of using force — because adversaries don’t see a slippery slope. If the United States imposes sanctions, a message has to be sent that force comes next. Otherwise, the country will just weather the sanctions.”

Perhaps the single event that symbolized America’s slide into “withdrawalism” was Mr. Obama’s failure to back up his Aug. 20, 2012 statement (which he reiterated in 2013), “We have been very clear to the Assad regime [in Syria], but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” A superpower that declares “red lines,” and then does nothing when they are stepped over, is not a superpower to be feared — or, in many cases, even heeded. In the case of Syria, America’s failure to act decisively ended up not only making the United states appear indecisive and unreliable, it also handed a coup to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who subsequently brokered the chemical weapons deal that emerged in September, 2013.

While it is wrong to overly fetishize the idea of American “exceptionalism,” a doctrine that elevates American values to almost divine status, it also is dangerous to imagine that America is just one ordinary country among many. Since the end of the First World War, the U.S. has been the world’s greatest power — and whole swathes of the planet, including Eastern Europe and many nations in the Middle East, still look to Washington for support and stability. The scenes of chaos playing out in these areas are just a taste of what we can expect if American “withdrawalism” becomes the long-term foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth.

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.

Issues:

Iran Russia Syria