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Victor Davis Hanson: Obama Is Not Incompetent
As President Obama’s foreign police seems to be falling apart, many conservative critics and commentators wring their hands and wonder why he seems blind to the horrors that fill the newspapers. National Security Agencies are today analyzing an internet video that appears to show the Jordanian fighter pilot shot down by ISIL being burned alive. Why, Obama’s critics ask, doesn’t Mr. Obama see the dangers in Islamic extremism? Why won’t he call it what is: Islamic terrorism?
For many, Obama seems hapless. They thus attribute his policy to incompetence. We often hear that his lack of experience and accomplishment is coming home to roost. That he is just in over his head.
What these critics seem to miss is that they are making excuses for a president who — despite the feigned incompetence — knows exactly what he is doing. Victor Davis Hanson puts paid to the incompetence argument at National Review Online. This may be the most important analysis of Obama yet written:
While I think the symptomology of an ailing, herky-jerky United States is correct, the cause of such malaise is left unspoken. The Obama team — with its foreign policy formulated by President Obama himself, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, White House consigliere Valerie Jarrett, Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and present Secretary of State John Kerry — is not in fact befuddled by the existing world. Instead, it is intent on changing it into something quite different from what it is.
Hanson writes that the Obama foreign policy doctrine is grounded in “four pillars of belief.” Briefly summarized, they are:
- That the US, with its history of intervention and (perceived) nation building, has made the world unfair by denying the right of the various nations be as they wish to be.
- That nations will be reasonable if the US doesn’t get in the way.
- That we should seek equality abroad just as we demand equality at home.
- The details don’t matter as long as the goal is ultimately achieved (in other words, a few eggs will have to be broken).
Every conservative pundit and politician must read Hanson’s article. Only when we truly understand Obama’s motivations can we possibly hope to take corrective action. Obama is a radical egalitarian who wants the world to be leveled so that all nations can enjoy equal power to pursue their own goals, regardless of how odious they may be. In this regard, ISIL is nothing more than a movement towards a soon to be realized cultural achievement. Since the future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam, it doesn’t much matter if the future is decapitated.
If Iran succeeds in building a bomb, well, for Obama and his sycophants that is actually a good thing since the balance of power in the Middle East can then be finally equalized. Israel is too powerful, and a counter balance is needed. If that means an Islamic state with the power to destroy Israel so much the better. Israel will then have to curb its (nonexistent) bellicosity and thus take its place among all the nations of the Middle East (that assumes that Israel will still exist, but it’s not at all clear that Obama believes that the destruction of Israel would be bad thing).
Hanson is steely-eyed in his analysis as he puts down the media trope that Obama is flailing around or just kicking back until he is out of office. This is delusional. Here, at home, the president has transformed the nation in ways unthinkable just a few years ago. Obama has forced his agenda on the nation through executive action and strong box secrecy. His highest hope is that he achieve such sweeping success in his foreign policy. And when his opponents let him off as a lazy failure they encourage his deliberate recklessness.
We must get this straight. President Obama is not a bungler. He is an ideologue for who only the goal matters. The means are important only to the degree that they can push the agenda along. Obama has fundamentally changed America, and he is hard at work trying to fundamentally change the world.
Image Credit: Chuck Kennedy (White House) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Published in Foreign Policy, General
Charlie Cooke and Kevin Williamson had a great assessment of where Obama lies on the political spectrum in this weeks Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast.
I prefer to think of him as incompetent and in over his head as opposed to an evil with a master plan. The latter in some ways gives him more credit. I just don’t see any coherent, even if radical, strategy behind anything he does. I see someone who postures and reacts to events incoherently, who makes decisions based purely on short-term political interest. As examples, the decision to go into Libya where he was pressured by the Europeans to act(frankly I would have preferred staying out of it), his decision to leave Iraq to fulfill a campaign promise (and now look how things have spiraled out of control), his red line on Syria where we are not involved, then involved, then fighting those who are fighting ISIL while we are fighting ISIL, then Ukraine where he makes grand pronouncements about bullying from Russia, then sends the Ukrainians Happy Meals. It just strikes me as someone who does not have any coherence, strategy or convictions behind his foreign policy.
There is also no doubt given his parents, grandparents and who he has surrounded himself with that he is a leftist, but I think he beliefs are skin deep and cynical. To agree with VDH, we have to believe that this man who has accomplished nothing before moving up each level, who never administered anything, never ran anything, never built anything, never published anything academic, never did anything as State or US Senator, all of a sudden has the competence and fortitude to put in place a master plan. I just don’t buy it. I will take the incompetence explanation over the malfeasance one.
I think Obama legitimately wants to create a better world. He is competent in the pursuit of his proximate goals, but his goals are informed by an ideology based on wishful thinking about human nature. So pursuit of his proximate goals will not result in the achievement of his ultimate goal, but its frustration. He is competently destroying structures that were based on an accurate apprehension of human nature, and, if his actions cannot be reversed, he will deliver us unprotected to a far more different and more dangerous world than he imagines. He is incompetent where it really matters, in understanding reality.
The question of Barry’s intellectual heft and success is paramount to this thread.
The Democrats had power and used it to do as they pleased.
The Democrats also protected Barry’s backside whenever legislation arrived that Barry did not want to deal with. The record for Dirty Harry’s stopping House legislation from being considered coincided with the Senate essentially doing nothing.
Barry deserves a lot of credit. He will do a great deal of harm to the individuals, families, businesses, and allies of this country. He will do it knowing what he is doing and if he is blocked in one arena, he will do it in another. He won’t waste time dealing with potential losses, he’ll shift his attack in an open direction.
If he cannot use Congress to rubberstamp his issues, he’ll do so by executive order.
Barry is real smart and he does not really care how you see him. He just needs a stage to preen on once in a while, and a captive audience of fawning fools whose intelligence is particularly low where Barry is concerned.
Dr. Hanson suggests that we must keep his four pillars in mind if we can ever hope to understand how O thinks and why he does the things he does. The article articulates themes that seem obvious to me. But that’s me. As to the specific theme of incompetence, Mr. O has surrounded himself with bureaucrats and policy types who are doing the in the trenches work while O serves as a prophet. O is obviously not a details guy, but Valerie Jarrett and her helpers can figure out ways to get the job done. Consider Josh Ernest–a professional liar who, though vastly less talented than his predecessor, still spins yarns about Administration action even when what he says is patently absurd. This keeps the illusion of incompetence going while O refuses to see the obvious truth about Iran, IS, Russia, Cuba, you name it.The focus is shifted away from the actual issues to questions of O’s competence. Obama is playing long ball, sure that history will judge him well. This is the vision of a prophet, and like most all prophets he will be derided in the present tense, but proven wise in the long run. Or so he thinks.
I don’t think Obama is incompetent, I think leftism is incompetent. Left-wingers are so often shocked by things that right-wingers predicted, like terrorists taking over Iraq when US troops pulled out, or health insurance premiums going up, or small businesses closing when the minimum wage is raised, etc. etc. Obama is a shrewd executor of terrible ideas. He is competent in his incompetence.
I personally underestimated the amount of damage he would do, but I don’t blame him – I blame Americans who still haven’t questioned left-wing policies a little more. He is just a product of our times.
There are certain people who speak about issues in a way that shows the depth of their intellect. Not that they are necessarily eloquent, but that they have thought about the issues deeply and clearly. Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Charles Krauthammer come to mind. I see none of that in Obama.
Obama has always behaved as if he was on a mission from God instead an American leader.
Several issues here:
1) The characterization of Obama’s foreign policy sounds suspiciously identical to the libertarian one…so.
2) In most cases, I have not heard any GOP alternative, and certainly many of what individual GOP “foreign policy” types recommend, are indistinguishable from what Obama is actually doing (e.g. John McCain).
2) This characterization, seems to me, to not conform to what we actually see on the ground.
I know that there’s an inherent anti-Obama knee-jerk reaction to anything this administration, or anything the US does in general (from conservatives, this time). But the reality on the ground doesn’t seem to confirm to this characterization
a) He took the same stance in Libya as John McCain did.
b) He took the same stance in Syria as John McCain did.
c) In Syria he was attacked for supporting “the rebels”, and also attacked for not supporting the rebels enough. He was attacked for being pro-Assad, and for not being pro-Assad enough. Overall, the real US stance on Syria was…let them kill each other. And that seems to me to be the only reasonable option there.
d) Remember Kobane? I guess, not. When ISIS was attacking Kobane, all the conservative pundits were crying out about how this was evidence of US weakness. Well, turns out, Kobane was won, and ISIS is on the retreat there.
Conservative reaction to that?…crickets….
e) The US is conducing a rather large attack on ISIS in Syria and in Iraq. It’s just that, you’re not going to hear about on the US news. There’s constant US aerial involvement in the fight against ISIS, in coordination with the Iraqi or Kurdish troops on the ground.
f) Remember Russia? Their economy is on the brink of collapse. The sanctions and coordinated assault on their economy was a rather…effective…response. Not to mention the US stepped up with dozens of exercises in E.European countries bordering Russia, and increased substantially their troop deployment there. Short of war with Russia…what else are we supposed to do?
g) As far as Iran is concerned, the issue is far from black and white. Remember all those assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists? Remember all those virus attacks on Iranian nuclear plants? Who do you think did that?
Iran is also fighting against AQ and ISIS. Iran is the main force fighting ISIS…in Iraq. Should we not let them fight each other, rather then intervene in an Islamic civil war?
Oh and BTW…Iran is in Iraq now because of the previous US foreign policy which essentially handed Iraq over to pro-Iranian Shiias. That was a good idea, no? Now it’s biting us in the a**.
3) So what’s the big criticism here? Everything the US has done so far seems to be what the US has always done. And that’s mainly because US foreign policy is mostly on auto-pilot. I don’t see any particularly big shift here at all from previous presidents.
4) So all we got is “he doesn’t call them Islamic”? Who cares what he calls them. How does that change anything? The US is constantly bombing them either way.
What do we want? We want troops back in Iraq and in Syria? I don’t want that. I want them to continue killing each other in perpetuity, in fact, and I don’t want any US soldiers to have to die fighting for something that has no clear boundaries and objectives or outcomes.
AIG ————————– On second thought, have a great day.
Israel. ( God bless their hearts. )
I think it’s obvious he isn’t interested in empowering Democrats. He’s interested in making federalism obsolete. Who cares about the states and their representatives when the federal government and its agencies have the power to mandate just about anything.
What does he need to get passed? His budget? It’s inconsequential (as it has been every year of his presidency). All the discretionary spending is in the noise compared to entitlements and servicing the debt. And it would take a miracle for even a Republican Congress to reform entitlements at this point. Americans won’t stand for it. Transformation complete.
You think he’s going to commit an exponentially larger effort to defeating ISIS? When he says, “the global coalition” is going to take care of it now? Based on what evidence? Why would he want to beat back ISIS? Because they’re barbaric and anti-Western? We’ll see. He quite willingly squandered the victory Bush/Petraeus won in Iraq.
Oh, I think they’ll spin so fast it will make Iran’s centrifuges look like they’re standing still. “Iran was going to get the bomb anyway. This balances power in the region between “competing” interests.” Etc.
American Jews are still a secure voting block for Obama and the Democrats. A sizable majority of them are more opposed to Republicans than they are supportive of Israel, because they’re more religiously Progressive than they are religiously Jewish.
You think Obamacare is a failure for his agenda? Why? He’s made the people dependent on the whims of government — sometimes literally begging for their lives. If his goal was to destroy any remnant of a free-market healthcare system, turning insurance companies into federal utilities would seem fairly ingenious. When has the fact that it’s fiscally unsustainable ever bothered the Left? They’ll be in chorus when the excrement hits the fan — Single Payer. And Republicans will only offer fewer freebies, making them de facto Democrat-lite.
Genius is only required when someone is trying to build something that works. Tearing down only takes a hammer (and sickle?), and a certain ruthlessness. He thinks he’s doing the world a favor by diminishing the American blight.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be too sure about that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games
This is a good one too- http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2012/04/02/with%20leaks-obamas-last-excuse-on-israel-gone/
Never mind.
I agree with your Benghazi obsession.
I’ll go with him being a Malignant Narcissist as explained by Sam Vaknin http://youtu.be/KpspQaddFWc
I think it’s obvious he isn’t interested in empowering Democrats. He’s interested in making federalism obsolete. Who cares about the states and their representatives when the federal government and its agencies have the power to mandate just about anything.
I agree that he has no respect for federalism. But he still wants Democrats to prevail. Otherwise his legacy is in jeopardy on all fronts. That’s why he wants to allow in 30 million or so Mexicans to become Democratic voters.
What does he need to get passed?
If he still had Democratic control he would pass comprehensive immigration reform, higher taxes on the wealthy (defined as all of us), innumerable freebies for students and other layabouts, and a reduced military budget. He would continue to poison race relations with more regulations and laws requiring a disparate impact analysis. And much more that he won’t even bother to mention knowing that the Republicans are in control.
Why would he want to beat back ISIS? Because they’re barbaric and anti-Western? We’ll see. He quite willingly squandered the victory Bush/Petraeus won in Iraq.
He doesn’t want to defeat anybody, but if he doesn’t he will be universally condemned and remembered as one of the worst presidents in history. Even he will come to see this as ISIS grows in power and territory. Another few beheadings or burnings at the stake and even the press will see it, eventually.
American Jews are still a secure voting block for Obama and the Democrats. A sizable majority of them are more opposed to Republicans than they are supportive of Israel, because they’re more religiously Progressive than they are religiously Jewish.
Unfortunately this is mostly true, but at the margins Democratic support in the Jewish community might be waning. But only at the margins.
You think Obamacare is a failure for his agenda?
Not yet, but my point was that his failure to write the bill correctly leaves it open to the challenge of King v. Burwell.
Ultimately, the question of whether Obama is an incompetent who means well or a clever fiend is hard to prove. My view is colored by my experience. I’ve known a lot more people who are about half as smart as they think they are than the type who truly want to diminish American prospects both at home and in the world.
J Flei: #37 “I don’t think Obama is incompetent, I think leftism is incompetent.”
The twentieth century is littered with virtually omni-competent people who served a bad ideology. Obama is of the same cut but is limited to some degree by the citizenry among whom he must navigate without losing all touch.
John Hendrix: #40 “Obama has always behaved as if he was on a mission from God instead an American leader.”
I have long thought that Obama believes he is god, and a god who doesn’t much like America at that.
I wanted to add something upon deeper reflection. I think Obama believes that the American public will be more tolerant of non-intervention, even in a good cause or national interest, than intervening and not succeeding quickly. That is, the price to pay for backing down from “red lines” is minor compared with the price of doing something and failing. (The possibility of success isn’t even in the picture.)
I’m sorry to say, I think that assessment is correct, but only up to a point. I think at some point people will recognize how America’s place in the world has eroded and they won’t be happy. You could see a little of that last fall when ISIS was on the march, though people seem content to go back to drift.
Who was it that said ‘A’ leaders surround themselves with others ‘A’s, while ‘B’ leaders surround themselves with ‘C’s? Given that so many of the people in this administration seem to be ‘F’s (wasn’t there anyone there who could have argued persuasively that maybe sending James Taylor to France might not be a good idea?), what does that suggest about the competence of the guy at the top?
I read this a couple of days ago and just ignored it, but it’s stuck with me somehow and I want to say how much this sort of thing bothers me. Calling Obama a manifestation of Satan is not something I can just let slip by. We often complain about the left demonizing conservatives for their views, but this is literally demonizing Obama in an ugly way. I also cannot stand Obama as a president, and think left-wing ideas are destructive and awful, but it’s better to save words like evil and Satan for guys like ISIS or Hitler or North Korea.
I am not an educated Catholic, but I doubt if many Catholic theologians would agree with this rhetoric. Don’t get me wrong, though, I think leftism is one of the most destructive forces on the planet, but the Satan stuff I can’t abide.
I think calling Obama Satan is over the top. However, I think ,like Clinton, he is not worthy of the office, leftism aside. To me he is a con artist and liar, like Bill. Any man that would attend a Church with Reverand Wright as pastor for 20 years alone should disqualify him. I truly believe he loathes this country, then wants to lead it to satisfy his own ego. What bothers me is that something has changed in the American character that has allowed a dissembling philandering draft dodger, then a deceptive con artist to defeat two war heroes and an accomplished, generous businessman.
Agreed. Didn’t Reverend Wright say “God Damn America”? Unfortunately, I know a lot of people who think this way, and who think blaming America is a sign of intellectual refinement. Mitt Romney’s slogan was “Believe in America” and he lost, sadly.
Equating Obama with “Satan” is defamatory and is a form of character assassination that should not be countenanced in polite and civil conversation. Signed: Satan