Why Obama's Foreign Policy is Such a Mess

Iran is on the brink of getting nuclear weapons and its declared goal is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Islamists are seizing power throughout the Middle East. Turkey has turned away from the West to rediscover its inner Islamofascism. Israel is increasingly isolated. China owns more and more of the debt of the US as the US drowns in ever-increasing deficits. Obama announces a withdrawal date from Afghanistan, which encourages the Taliban to hold on. Pakistan is in chaos as usual. North Korea is restless. Nobody fears the US, especially the radical Islamists, who have sized Obama up and concluded that he is a paper tiger. The UK descends into relativism and anti-Christian cultural Marxism while the US gives its former main ally the back of its hand. Obama bows to dictators and then acts in such a way as to make sure we know it wasn't just symbolic. The French are more decisive in Libya than the US. - the French, for heaven's sake!

What an unbelievable mess: Barack Obama makes George Bush look like George Washington!

George Weigel has a wonderful post at National Review Online explaining the worldview of the currently dominant wing of the Democratic Party. It is entitled: "How Democrats View the World." He writes:

"Those ideas have a precise and definable origin: They first emerged when the New Left challenged the Truman/Acheson/Kennedy/(Scoop) Jackson Democratic consensus during the Vietnam War. In softer forms, they then became the new orthodoxy among Democratic foreign-policy mandarins like Cyrus Vance and Warren Christopher. Despite the fiascos to which these ideas led during the Carter and Clinton administrations (cf. the Iran hostage crisis and the American inability to prevent genocide in the Balkans), and despite the efforts of some in the old Democratic Leadership Council to change the intellectual template of Democratic foreign-policy thinking, these bad ideas have shown a remarkable resilience. They remain operative at all levels of the Obama foreign-policy team; they explain a great deal of what otherwise seems inexplicably stupid over the past several weeks; and they must be challenged by any 2012 Republican presidential candidate serious about American leadership in the world."

He then lists eight ideas:

1. Conflict is not the normal political phenomenon that it was assumed to be for millennia. Conflict is an aberration, and if there is conflict between nations or blocks of nations, or within nations, it must be because of some palpable injustice, the remedying of which will assuage the conflict in question and restore the natural order, which is peace.

2. Peace is not a matter of a rightly ordered and law-governed political community; rather, “peace” is a state of mind that can be willed into being.

3. The notion that the United States should actively seek to shape world politics is pernicious, not for the old isolationist reason that it’s bad for us, but because we tend to be bad for the world. Thus the United States should withdraw from the leadership role it has played in world affairs since 1941, scale down its military commitments, eventually end its work as global sheriff . . .

4. The use of armed force is almost always a bad idea and reflects, not the intractability of certain situations to other forms of conflict-resolution, but a failure of imagination and will on the part of U.S. policymakers. Moreover, if a combination of pressures compels the occasional use of force, the prime strategic imperative is to devise an exit strategy that will end the use of force at the earliest possible moment.

5. The present state system should be replaced by some form of international governance, in which multilateral and international bodies play the leading role.

6. The primary responsibility of U.S. policymakers is to advance the construction of a multilaterally organized and run international order, not to defend and advance the interests of the United States.

7. With the Cold War (which was in no small part Harry Truman’s fault) now over, there is no power, group of powers, or ideology that poses any grave threat to the United States.

8. We are not the indispensable nation. There is nothing morally or politically distinctive, much less special, about the American democratic experiment in ordered liberty. So there is no distinctively American approach to world politics, and the United States ought not seek any distinctive role in 21st-century world affairs.

He expand on each one briefly. Read it all here.

It is obvious that the intellectual father of these ideas is not Augustine, but the modern anti-Augustine: J. J. Rousseau. It is also obvious that these ideas are incompatible with a Christian worldview, in which evil is real, original sin is universal and peace is an elusive goal in this present age. The roots of these ideas are Utopianism and Pelagianism.

No wonder Obama's foreign policy is such a disaster. It is not because he is inexperienced or because the world is particularly bad right now, it is because his beliefs are wrong and his worldview does not correspond to reality. Bad ideas lead to death, destruction, tyranny, injustice and war.

Rousseau and the Rise of the Corporate State

In The Social Contract, something fundamental changes in the development of modern liberalism that lays the foundation for modern corporatism. Corporatism is the modern belief in the unitary power of the all-encompassing State that is the provider of goods for citizens and the final authority in all matters political, economic, religious and moral. Corporatism can take a Fascist form or a Communist form, but it can also take a liberal democratic form. In the case of Fascism and Communism it becomes a "hard totalitarianism," but in its evolving liberal democratic form it becomes a "soft totalitarianism" or as Pope Benedict XVI called it: "a dictatorship of relativism." The seeds of "hard totalitarianism" are in Hobbes, but it is only with Rousseau that the groundwork is laid for the "soft totalitarianism" we see rising in the West today.

Rousseau agrees with Hobbes that all the evils of European society stem from Christianity and that the Church must be neutralized as a power in society. Thus, it appears that Hobbes' Leviathan is necessary because it takes up into itself both the civil power of the state and the religious authority of the Church. Yet, Rousseau is unhappy with this solution and finds Hobbes' Leviathan despotic; "horrible and false" is what he calls it. What is Rousseau's objection to Hobbes' police state? He objects that in such a state man lives only for the gaze of others, whom he hates. The individual is a slave and even those who command are slaves to opinion. There is no room for individuality. Modern liberal society makes men unhappy because this society is unnatural. As Manent puts if, for Rousseau (as for the ancients): "The good society can only be one that conforms to man's nature." (Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 73)

Now this seems, on the surface, astonishing! Is Rousseau advocation a return to the teleological anthropology of Plato and Aristotle? Is he perhaps going to advocate human rights rooted in the will and design of the Creator? Is he about to abandon the Enlightenment project? In a word, no.

Rousseau identifies human nature as what you have left once you have stripped away all "artificiality," that is, everything contributed by socialization into human society. The natural man is asocial and thus a cipher. Man is nothing in particular. As Manent observes, this is the "paradoxical moment when man's nature is most vehemently appealed to in the political debate, and when it ceases in fact to serve as its regulator and criterion. . . It is the point when revolution, in the modern sense of the term, becomes possible." (74)

Since a good political order (in Rousseau's view) must both enable individualism and also base itself on human nature, the solution is for the political order to itself become a perpetual revolution. The individual, whose essence is liberty, thus becomes one in essence with the State, whose essence is revoulution. The "general will" is the locus of all individual wills and is the new artificial individual (the State) with which all individual wills identify. The very process of change becomes a matter of the individual changing along with the State in a revolutionary process, which expresses the essence of man, namely freedom. As long as man is bound by nothing he may consider himself to be a free citizen of a free State.

Locke's property-owning individual citizens turn into Rousseau's citizens - Spartans. Rousseau's citizen is free in the sense of being autonomous but he is such only insofar as he is part of a State that is identical with his own nature by engaging in perpetual revolution. Manent comments:

"To say that with Rousseau modern political thought reached its limits is to say that after him there is no longer any political philosophy in the strict or original sense. As we have seen, once the idea of nature has been exhausted, the question of the best political regime conforming to man's nature can no longer be posed as such. Nature ceases to be the criterion, the reference, or the model. Two other criteria are going to take its place: history and liberty. All political considerations and theories after the French Revolution will develop within philosophies of history and will be subordinated to them." (78)

Rousseau represents the moment in Western civilization when the theoretical foundations were laid for the swallowing up of the individual in the maw of the corporate state. In a very important this represents the end of the West, that is, the end of that experiment in Europe in which the individual was held to precede the State and to be endowed with dignity and rights that come from Nature or God, but which the State could only recognize. With Rousseau the framework was put in place for the right-wing and left-wing horrors of the twentieth century.