Foreign Policy

There are three things to remember about North Korea:

Never believe media reports about the “crazy” and “irrational” North Korean leader. Kim Jong-il might be bad and dangerous, but he is not mad.

North Korea is not about to get rid of its nuclear weapons, because they guarantee regime survival.

Any story about North Korea will invariably have the same headline (see above).

It’s open season on the Europeans at the moment. Following the lead of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who delivered a stiff warning to NATO the other day, everyone has been piling on. The latest was an article in The Washington Post by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, under the provocative headline “Europe no longer matters.”

Nothing like kicking a man when he’s down. It must be said, the Europeans are an easy target. The other day in Washington, I heard Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) pointing out that the U.S. was subsidizing European social programs through its predominant financial contribution to NATO, as European military budgets declined. But here’s what I’m hearing in Europe at the moment: that America is weak.

Listening to Sen. Rand Paul (R.-Ky) talking about foreign policy this morning, it was hard to believe that this was the same person accused by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) of being on the side of terrorists for opposing the renewal of the Patriot Act.

I was curious to find out where the Tea Party stands on the burning foreign-policy issues that have been overshadowed by budget matters since the 112th Congress began. Not only did I agree with most of what Paul said, but many of the points he made had already found their way into this blog.

We are only weeks away from President Obama’s announced troop drawdown in Afghanistan. But with the scheduled withdrawal supposed to begin July 1, the president has not yet decided on whether the number will be “significant” — his words — or “modest,” in the words of the Defense secretary, Robert Gates.

I heard a couple weeks ago that about 20,000 soldiers, or two-thirds of the “surge” troops, were expected to return home next month. But that is considerably higher than the anticipation now that only about 5,000 would return — the argument being that it would be a mistake to sharply reduce troop numbers during the Taliban’s fighting season. Gates, making his farewell tour of Afghanistan, has said that he would opt to “keep the shooters and take the support out first.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) wants only 3,000 out.

President Obama stood up to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in his Middle East speech, in which he defied the conventional wisdom, which holds that all efforts towards a peace settlement with the Palestinians are now at a standstill.

The fact is, though, he had to. Obama couldn’t let Netanyahu dictate the terms of the debate while in Washington, where the prime minister will address AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and Congress in the next few days. Nor could Obama wait until he spoke to AIPAC himself on Sunday, and miss the opportunity of a global audience that he had today.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
— William Butler Yeats, 1920

The Ayatollah is long dead, Saddam toppled, Osama bin Laden gunned down and Gadhafi on the run. But now Israel faces its greatest existential threat: America.

In the end, Obama will be crowned caliph and conqueror of Israel. Those who for 90 years now have puzzled over the Irish wizard’s occult vision of the time of turning; the time when the falcon cannot hear the falconer and things fall apart, the time when golem “finds its way out of 20 centuries of stony sleep” and heads to Israel at the end of the world, look no further than Samantha Power’s conversation about Israel as a “thought experiment.”

A young German acquaintance — a waiter — says without malicious intent that all the troubles in the world today are because of the union between Israel and America. It is the European waiter's consensus, he says. Not a new story. When West Virginia’s Robert C. Byrd, who singlehandedly spoke against the invasion of Iraq in the Senate, traveled overseas in 1955 as a young member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he said that while visiting Arab camps of refugees in Jerico, he “heard voices of deep animosity toward the United States, and the refugees voiced a fierce determination to return to Palestine.”

Like the old Politiburo-driven popular front of “violence inherent in the system!” polemic, the Republican punditry today are quickly dispatched to call the Obama victory a historic “Bush-Obama” drama.

Who are these guys kidding? The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld adventure was a journey to the end of the night and an American disgrace that will never be forgotten. Our best warriors and men of honor of both parties like Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), former NATO chief Wesley Clark and Colin Powell’s chief Col. Lawrence Wilkerson brought the strongest dissent. It was a hoax from the beginning, said Wilkerson. The invasion of Iraq was “the wrong war,” said Clark. This war will instead be remembered as beginning to go forth with some credibility when George W. Bush’s secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was thrown out of office and Robert Gates was brought forth to try and retrieve any remaining shreds of American character.

If I had to grade President Obama’s interview with Steve Kroft on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last night, I’d give him a C+.

I know that’s apt to annoy a lot of people. The president certainly came across as sober, human, decisive and effective. But in the end, he didn’t quite hit the nail on the head. The interview was a bit too much James Bond and not enough Henry Kissinger.

Like all Americans, I was thrilled to hear Osama bin Laden met his fate last week and see America assert its influence in the Middle East. Still, the administration needs to resist viewing this successful battle as the end of the war. Coupled with the Arab Spring, the killing of bin Laden was certainly a significant blow to al Qaeda, but it remains largely symbolic. Placing too much weight on any one individual in our fight against Islamic fundamentalism is a dangerous path to start down. While bin Laden might have been the mastermind behind 9/11, it was the jihadist ideology he promoted that was at the heart of the attacks and continues to threaten us today.

Why are we giving Pakistan billions each year in assistance for fighting terrorism if they're so outrageously bad at it?

Chump change? I don’t think so. Since 9/11, we’ve given over $18 billion in U.S. aid to the country. For 2011, another $1.8 to $2 billion is earmarked for the country. And what do we have to show for it?

Earlier this year, the country held one of our CIA agents, returning him only after we paid millions more in essentially a ransom to get him back. Relations are strained. And now the country’s leaders are saying the United States overstepped its authority and violated the sovereignty of the nation of Pakistan.