What Obama Knows
Every president gets things wrong. What sets Obama apart is his ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance.
By Bret
Stephens
WSJ.com
Serious people feel an
obligation to listen whenever
Barack Obama speaks. They furrow their brow and
hold their chin and parse every word. They assume
that most everything a president says is
significant, which is true. They assume that what's
significant must also be well-informed. Not
necessarily.
I've been thinking about this as it becomes clear
that, even at an elementary level, Mr. Obama often
doesn't know what he's talking about. It isn't so
much his analysis of global events that's wrong,
though it is. The deeper problem is the foundation
of knowledge on which that analysis is built.
Here, for instance, is Mr.
Obama answering a question posed in August by
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who
wanted the president's thoughts on the new global
disorder.
"You can't generalize across the globe," the
president replied. "Because there are a bunch of
places where good news keeps on coming. Asia
continues to grow . . . and not only is it growing
but you're starting to see democracies in places
like Indonesia solidifying."
"The trend lines in Latin America are good," he
added. "Overall, there's still cause for optimism."
Here, now, is reality: In
Japan, the economy is contracting. China's
real-estate market is a bubble waiting to burst.
Indonesia's democracy may be solidifying, but so is
Islamism and the persecution of religious
minorities. Democracy has been overthrown in
Thailand. The march toward freedom in
Burma—supposedly one of Mr. Obama's (and
Hillary Clinton's ) signature diplomatic
victories—has stalled. India may do better than
before under its new prime minister, Narendra Modi,
but gone are the days when serious people think of
India as a future superpower. The government of
Pakistan is, as ever, on the verge of collapse.
As for Latin America, Argentina just defaulted
for the second time in 13 years. Brazil is in
recession. Venezuela is a brutal dictatorship.
Ecuador is well on its way to becoming one.
I begin with these examples not because there
aren't bright spots in Asia (South Korea is one) or
Latin America (Colombia is another) but because it's
so typically Obama. Warn against generalization—and
then generalize. Cite an example—but one that isn't
representative. Talk about a trend line—but get the
direction of the trend wrong.
Next example: Turkey. In 2009 Mr. Obama decided
to elevate Turkey and its prime minister, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, as his core partner in the Middle
East. "On issue after issue we share common goals,"
he told the Turkish parliament in April 2009. In
2012 he said that he and Mr. Erdogan had developed
"bonds of trust."
Yet in 2009 it was already clear that Mr. Erdogan
was orchestrating huge show trials against his
political opponents based on outlandish charges. By
2010 it was clear that he was an avowed supporter of
Hamas, not to mention a vocal anti-Semite. In 2012
the Committee to Protect Journalists noted that
Turkey had more journalists in prison than China and
Iran put together.
Now turn to Yemen. In 2012, after the Arab
Spring, the president singled out Yemen as a model
for a prospective political transition in Syria. Mr.
Obama was at it again just two weeks ago, citing the
fight against al Qaeda in Yemen as the model for the
war he intends to wage against the Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria.
Whoops. "Over the weekend," noted McClatchy's
Adam Baron on Monday, "the growing gap between
administration rhetoric and reality came to a head,
as the acerbically anti-American Houthi rebels—who
American diplomats allege have close financial and
military ties with Iran—took control of many areas
of the capital, Sanaa, with minimal resistance from
the U.S.-supplied Yemeni armed forces."
Keep going around the world. He declared victory
over al Qaeda and dismissed groups such as ISIS as
"the jayvee team" at the very moment that al Qaeda
was roaring back. He mocked the notion of Russia
being our enemy—remember the line about the 1980s
wanting "its foreign policy back"?—just as Russia
was again becoming our enemy.
He predicted in 2012 that "Assad's days are
numbered" just as the Syrian dictator was turning
the tide of war in his favor. He defended last
November's nuclear deal with Tehran, saying "it's
not going to be hard for us to turn the dials back
or strengthen sanctions even further" in the event
that diplomacy failed. In reality, as the Foundation
for Defense of Democracies notes, "burgeoning trade
ties with Turkey, increased oil sales to China, and
reports of multibillion-dollar Russian-Iranian trade
deals, not yet consummated but in the offing, are
giving [Iran] a 'Plan B' escape hatch."
Every administration tries to
spin events its way; every president gets things
wrong. Mr. Obama is not exceptional in those
respects. Where he stands
apart is in his combination of ideological rigidity
and fathomless ignorance. What does the
president know? The simple answer, and maybe the
truest, is: not a lot.