It Takes a Rogue Nation to Stop a Rogue State
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The international community looked into Putin's
eyes and blinked. Multilateralism has failed as
badly as it did in the days of the League of
Nations, but then again it never actually worked.
The international order that everyone pretends is
a real force in world affairs is really the United
States and a few partners doing all the work and
letting the diplomats and bureaucrats of the world
pretend that they matter. Without America, the
United Nations would be just as useless as the
League of Nations. With America, the United Nations
is only a deterrent when the United States puts its
foot down and the rest of the world doesn't get in
the way.
It has become fashionable to denounce the United
States as a rogue state. A military intervention,
even with the backing of its Western allies, but
outside the framework of the organizations of the
international order, was deemed unilateralism and
cowboy diplomacy.
And then Obama rode in on a three-speed bike and won
a Nobel Peace Prize for his commitment to doing
nothing.
The multilateral system is helpless in the face of
aggression. That is as true today as it was eighty
years ago. International agreements are worthless
without steel and lead behind them. The United
Nations is incapable of acting when one of its more
powerful members is the aggressor or the aggressor's
patron, the foreign policy experts of the left crank
out editorials explaining why we can't do anything
about Afghanistan, North Korea, Syria or Ukraine and
the Secretary of State explains that strength is
weakness and weakness is strength.
International law couldn't stop Hitler. It couldn't
stop Japan. It took the United States to do all
that. The foreign policy experts will deny it, the
editorials will decry it and the Common Core
textbooks will refuse to print it; but it takes a
rogue nation to stop a rogue state.
England and France's diplomatic outreach to Nazi
Germany led to the seizure of the Rhineland, the
annexations of Austria and a portion of
Czechoslovakia, followed by the invasions of
Czechoslovakia and Poland. American diplomacy and
sanctions on Japan led to Pearl Harbor. The only
time that the United Nations proved to be of any use
was during the Korean War and that was before its
doors were thrown open to an army of Third World
dictatorships for sale to the highest bidder.
The issue isn't whether the United States should
intervene in Ukraine, but whether it should have the
option to do something more meaningful than draw
faint red lines and threaten worthless sanctions.
Every mob throwing things at soldiers and police
isn't necessarily composed of the good guys just
because they have photogenic protesters and colorful
flags.
Our instinct to automatically support the underdog
is just another dangerous figment of the
multilateral mindset.
The United States has unselectively adopted the
human rights agenda of the internationalists and
allowed our foreign affairs priorities to be curated
by the diplomats of the left who know exactly whom
to denounce and what not to do about it. UN
Ambassador Samantha Power, wearing a bitter frown,
agonizing over the woes of the world, is the face of
our senseless and useless diplomacy that forces us
to play the moral scold without being able to back
it up.
American foreign policy has become indistinguishable
from the United Nations agenda and just as impotent,
fixated on the recommendations of human rights
committees instead of national interests, incapable
of addressing historical alliances, and unable to
build its responses around anything except the same
Powerian empty shriek of self-righteous human rights
outrage.
Obama's America has turned a cold impartial face to
its allies, aspiring instead to become the vessel of
international organizations while assigning its
morality to an international committee. American
foreign policy is under international management and
that transfers its decision process from D.C. to an
international network of committees incapable of
doing anything except generating worthless reports
and denouncing Israel
The United States was the ghost in the machine of
the United Nations, but now that the United States
is the United Nations, the United States has become
the puppet of a puppet.
The weakness of multilateral diplomacy is that it
strives to negotiate accommodations to the clashes
of the moment without reference to past history or
the trajectory of future conquests. This was a
weakness that Hitler understood and exploited,
reducing the issue to the current status of the
Sudetenland or the Rhineland, rather than to past
and future war aims. It was only when the Allies
broke out of the diplomatic mindset of considering
every Hitlerian conquest individually and debating
the merits of defending Czechoslovakia, rather than
anticipating the conquest of Poland, that real
resistance to the Nazi war machine finally began.
Unfortunately the Allies failed to learn from
history and accepted Stalin's piecemeal takeovers at
face value only waking up after much of the world
had fallen under the Red Flag. It was President
Eisenhower’s "Domino Theory" that assigned a value
to each conquest not based on its own status, but
its place in a chain of conquests in a struggle for
regional dominance.
Sarah Palin understood in 2008 what the school of
foreign policy "realists" did not, that Georgia was
not significant in isolation but as a prerequisite
to the invasion of Ukraine and likewise Ukraine
should be understood in the context of an imperial
territorial ambition that stretches far beyond its
borders.
Whether or not we choose to oppose that ambition we
should understand it on its own terms, rather than
the media's obsession with photogenic revolutions,
the agenda of foreign policy experts seeking to turn
America into a powerless multilateral shell and a
liberal establishment that treats every
international event as an opportunity to plump the
praises of the inexperienced and incompetent leader
that they foisted on the country with the equivalent
of an American Idol audition.
The media gets behind anyone throwing rocks or
Molotov cocktails in front of a camera lens as long
as his target isn’t an authoritarian government of
the left. Foreign policy experts who insisted that
Putin wouldn’t go this far, now insist that he won’t
go any farther. And the liberal establishment would
cheer Obama’s leadership while an asteroid was
colliding with the planet.
The United States should have a strong military, not
so that it can use it, but so that it won’t need to
use it. Military budget cuts send the message that
we won't intervene in international conflicts which
makes it more likely that our enemies will start
international conflicts and that some of those
conflicts will drag us in anyway no matter how much
of the fleet we mothball and how many transsexual
dance troupes and gay weddings we host on what used
to be the army bases of a world power.
Military weakness invites war, whether it was the
British trying to face down Hitler with no bullets
or Obama announcing another round of drastic defense
cuts just before Putin rolled into Ukraine.
Diplomacy is only the art of saying "Nice doggie"
until you find the stick if you were stupid enough
to throw away the big stick in the first place. And
then you had better hope that you are dealing with a
very stupid dog that won't gnaw your arm off before
you can get at that stick.
The multilateralists believe that cutting the
military will keep America from acting unilaterally
and then their spokesmen are left with nothing to do
except issue condemnations and draw red lines in the
name of what used to be a world power. Human rights
committee nuts like Samantha Power and anti-war
boomers who never grew up like John Kerry end up
causing more wars by combining empty rhetoric and
inaction than they would if they either shut up or
actually did something about it.
The United States should have clear commitments and
agreements that it keeps, rather than randomly
butting into every single conflict and human rights
violation on the planet. Its leaders should decide
whether they really are serious about Syria or
Ukraine or any other place on earth that they issue
press releases about and keep quiet about them if
they are not.
And if they are serious, they should be ready to act
with the same decisiveness that Vladimir Putin
showed.
Despite all the accumulated multilateral rubbish
in the corner, history isn't made by nations
defending international law, but acting on their own
imperatives. Only a rogue nation that isn't bound by
the chains of multilateralism can take the
unilateral action necessary to stop a rogue state.
The world isn't a single state, there is no law that
applies to every country, no independent government
and no world police. There is only a wild frontier
and a cowboy who rides into town now and then with a
gun at his side and a law made up of his own moral
codes in his heart. The entire structure of
international law looks neat when written on a page,
but isn't worth a single bullet in his gun.
We've seen how it works when the cowboy puts on a
three piece suit, locks up his gun in a safe
controlled by a committee and spends all his time
attending committee meetings. The committee gives
him awards, but outside the committee hall there are
the screams of men and women being killed and when a
man with a gun comes for him, throwing the award at
his head doesn't help.
American cowboy diplomacy is the only defense that
the civilized world has against commissar diplomacy,
cossack diplomacy and caliphate diplomacy and that
is something that more of the three piece suit
diplomats who claim to care about human rights and
weak nations ought to understand and respect that.
The United States can't protect anyone when it's
functioning as a cog in the multilateral system. To
do something meaningful, it has to go rogue.