Foreign Policy

Despite all the fuss from the State Department about the leaking of a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, the Obama administration should be grateful, because the body of evidence will add to the pressure on Iran by revealing that its neighbors have been pleading for military action over its nuclear program.

Since 2008, the Saudi monarch has privately urged the U.S. to go to war on Iran, telling President Bush to “cut off the head of the snake,” according to cables published by The Guardian on the U.K. newspaper’s website. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain do not believe Iran will back down and are also calling for military action, according to more recent cables. Read more...

President Obama and the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, are between a rock and a hard place in responding to North Korea’s killing of two civilians and soldiers on the island of Yeonpyeong, which has undermined their policy of “strategic patience.”

The U.S. subcontracting to China of the North Korea conundrum has failed to produce any clear results. In South Korea, there are worries that China’s ultimate intention may be to annex North Korea, and Beijing seems to have little influence over Pyongyang despite its stated support for the transition in the “hermit state.”

The State Department says the U.S. will not respond “willy-nilly” to Tuesday’s “unprovoked” military attack via the six-party framework — grouping the U.S., the two Koreas, China, Russia and Japan. The first sign of a concrete reaction came today with the dispatch of a U.S. aircraft carrier for a U.S.-South Korea drill — presumably over the objections of the Chinese. 

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I appreciate the response to my Tuesday column, “Reagan Yes, START, Yes” by Tripp Baird of the Heritage Foundation.


I do want to correct one point in his rebuttal, right off the top. He suggests that the only reference I made to Republican concerns being addressed by treaty supporters was to state they were addressed, not to state how.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is expected to formalize at its Lisbon summit tomorrow a new timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.

The beginning of the drawdown of the 100,000 U.S. troop surge is still 2011, in line with President Obama’s promise to the American people. But a new deadline is being set for the completion of the withdrawal in 2014 and a full transition to Afghan security forces. The significance of that date is that it takes us beyond the next U.S. presidential elections.

The Pentagon says 2014 is an “aspirational” date that could slip further depending on the situation on the ground. The NATO secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told NPR this morning that NATO forces will remain for “as long as it takes.”

I can see this posing a political problem for Obama because he must have hoped that by the time November 2012 came along, Afghanistan would be forgotten as a campaign issue. The war certainly didn’t figure in the midterms and indeed foreign policy in general did not influence the result in any way.

But a presidential election is different. Obama will be under pressure from the Democratic base to stick to a withdrawal timetable, which the administration insists will be based on conditions on the ground.

What are those conditions now? NATO says its forces have regained the initiative, but there are signs that even in previously quiet zones such as Herat in western Afghanistan, violence and crime are on the rise.

In the meantime, the U.S. is escalating its military might in the battle against the Taliban in the southwest. The Washington Post reported today that M1 Abrams tanks have been deployed for the first time in the nine-year war. Yet these are the same aggressive tactics that have drawn protests from President Hamid Karzai, who angered U.S. officials with a recent interview with the same paper in which he complained that support for the war was being eroded.

Obama will have the chance to talk to Karzai in Lisbon about the strategy, which includes reaching out to the Taliban leadership to reach a political solution. But the president will return to Washington with a domestic problem of selling to his party the pursuit of this war over the horizon of his first term in office.

In conversations with the Chinese and Hong Kong banking and business community and through reading the Chinese English language press, the criticism of America’s fiscal and monetary policy is deafening. Hong Kong’s dollar and China’s RMB are tied to the U.S. dollar. The Chinese firmly believe the U.S. is using expansion of its dollar supply, euphemistically referred to as “quantitative easing” (QE II), to devalue the dollar in order to create jobs in the U.S. at the expense of emerging nations. They are also concerned the excess dollars will flow into Hong Kong, China and other countries with exchange rates tied to the dollar. This dollar inflow is expected to create commodity and real estate bubbles and generate inflation. This principal unintended consequence of QE II is agricultural inflation that will result in food shortages in the undeveloped world.
 
President Obama’s trip to Asia last week was a public relations disaster for U.S. economic leadership in the world. Obama is viewed by the Chinese and most of the finance ministers of the G-20 as a hypocrite who criticizes China for currency manipulation to fuel exports on the one hand while his administration justifies the Fed’s currency manipulation through QE II on the other.
 
The Chinese are very critical that the U.S. is using expansionary monetary policy as a substitute to deal with the government’s fiscal deficits and slow economic growth. They believe the U.S. has to address the root cause of the deficit which is unfunded government spending. They are also skeptical that unfunded government spending policy will create long-term jobs. The U.S. has to address issues of debt-financed consumer spending and government disincentives to private sector growth.
 
This criticism is especially interesting given that China is still very much a state controlled economy. Perhaps it takes a society with a history of state control to appreciate the limits of government intervention in, and manipulation of, the economy.


Armstrong Williams is on Sirius/XM Power 169, 7-8 p.m. and 4-5 a.m., Monday through Friday. Become a fan on Facebook- www.facebook.com/arightside, and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/arightside.

A trade war with China is almost inevitable. We see the opening salvos already. China’s recent announcement that it will restrict rare-earth mineral exports is basically a move against Japan, a U.S. ally in the G-20 coalition of industrial economies. The Chinese premier is going around embracing the Greek government, offering to buy worthless Greek bonds — again to try to weaken the U.S. coalition within the G-20. In a further saber-rattling maneuver, China banned imports of chicken feet from the U.S. — a food considered a delicacy in China, but a useless byproduct of poultry production in the U.S.

The focus of the next year for President Obama will be the economy: He told reporters at his first post-election press conference today that his “No. 1 concern” would be to restore jobs and reduce the deficit. The middle classes now know that he feels their pain.

He certainly never mentioned foreign policy goals among his priorities, and no White House reporter asked him about them. Foreign policy was not among the voters’ concerns during the campaign.

If you recall, our Founding Fathers gave us advice as our country looked to the future. George Washington’s farewell address urged us to stay away from the affairs of Europe. He recommended our ties be commercial, not political. Thomas Jefferson remarked, “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Fast-forward over 200 years and we cannot say we have followed any of that guidance. This is no more evident example than the never-ending “War on Terror.”

If I were President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, I would be feeling a little nervous after watching Obama’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly this morning.

First of all, Obama made it clear that his administration is still holding open a door of diplomacy “should Iran choose to walk through it.” But it remains incumbent on Iran to prove to the world that its nuclear intentions are peaceful.

Then he turned to human rights. Now, the Islamic Republic of Iran is already paranoid about a “velvet revolution” that could threaten its power. That explains its crackdown on the Iranian opposition since Ahmadinejad was reelected in last year’s contested elections, after which hundreds of people were imprisoned, many tortured and at least three killed.

President Obama has been frightfully consistent embracing high-profile issues that make him look like the liberal king of the world. Often this forces pragmatism to take a back seat to glorious politics. The promotion of Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations while arrogantly ignoring nuclear Iran is one such situation.
 
If President Obama were to achieve world peace, he would be permanently romanticized in history among the greats. What better start than the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? After all, this war illustrates the greater conflict between the modern West and the Muslim world. If his administration could find a resolution to this historical conflict, it could nullify larger future battles.  
 
Consequently, Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations are high-profile events. However, when put in proper perspective, it’s a fairly low impact war; the conflict is just contained between the two.
 
These pointless negotiations are burning precious American resources and robbing us of the time our president should be spending vigilantly protecting America — namely from Iran. President Obama's apathy out of arrogance, or perhaps empathy, toward a nuclear Iran has to be the most astounding thing I have witnessed in recent memory.
 
A nuclear Iran is far more threatening than Palestinians to both Israel and America. Yet, it’s not high profile enough for our president to give this issue his necessary attention.
 
What must happen to jog this administration's common sense for them to have a revelation moment before this complex matter truly erupts? A suicide bomber strapped with nukes blowing away half of Tel Aviv or Baghdad? We need leadership that is willing to roll up their sleeves and get dirty to get the job done.
 
Armstrong Williams is on Sirius/XM Power 169, 7-8 p.m. and 4-5 a.m., Monday through Friday. Become a fan on Facebook- www.facebook.com/arightside, and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/arightside.