The Metaphor became the actual Situation

I don't know why some things stick in my memory from when I was very young, and other things do not. But this is reality, and I'm glad it is because it helps me get a perspective on things I would otherwise have missed.

It has been something like six decades since I attended Sunday school which was Catholic and was done in French. What sticks in my memory from those days is the expression: “Et le verbe c'est fait chair” which roughly translates into: And the word became flesh. It means that God's spoken wish to save humanity from itself became Jesus, his son the redeemer in flesh and blood. At least that's the interpretation we were given.

At about the same time, or maybe a little later after that, I started reading books – some written for juveniles, others written for mature folks like my older brothers. I came across a fantasy about a boy that was sucked into the story of the novel he was reading, thus became part of the story – and if memory serves – helped carry the story to its happy ending.

Those two incidences came to mind the other day when I read Matthew Continetti's latest literary cerebration which came under the title: “An Anti-American White House,” published on September 5, 2015 in National Review Online. The first thing that hit me upon reading the article was this: it's here; it's already happening! That's because the story of the Jews infiltrating Palestine and taking it over was the metaphor that some of us had seen as the blueprint that the Jews will follow to take over America, having infiltrated the country deeply.

We though then that it might take two or three generations before the Americans are made into Palestinians in their own motherland … but here it was, Continetti had managed to turn the White House into Jewish territory. He labeled its occupants anti-American intruders – at par, perhaps, with Palestinian militants or resistance fighters or maybe terrorists. In any case, the metaphor had become an actual situation before its time.

This time, Matthew Continetti is talking about the support that President Obama has received, to uphold his veto in case the Republicans in the Senate reject the deal that the administration negotiated with Iran. He reports that the Associated Press news agency called it a “landmark Obama victory,” and so he asks: How many more of these victories our country can withstand?

This is not the kind of question a subject asks with regard to his sovereign; it is the kind that a sovereign asks with regard to a house servant. And that's not all because there is more that reflects this mentality. It came in response to Gideon Rose of Foreign Affairs who wrote that “Obama will likely pass on to his successors a foreign policy agenda in better shape than when he entered office.” To this, Continetti responds with the confidence of a disappointed sovereign: I'm not convinced.

And so, he explains himself. To do this, he signals two parts to his explanation. There is the subjective part – actually Obama's subjectivity – and there is the objective part which is that of the author. Subjectively, he says, Obama's conduct and the consequences thereof have been anti-American. Objectively, he goes on to say, Obama's actions have legitimized and emboldened nations whose anti-Americanism is vicious and serious.

To expand on all that, Continetti discusses at length the situations in which America finds itself with Iran, Cuba, China, Russia, the Islamic State, Libya and Afghanistan. He says that Iran remains anti-American and anti-Semitic. Cuba's elite bears long-held grievances against the United States. China remains unfree today as it was when Apple built its first factory there. Russia defames the United States everywhere in the world, and has Georgia, Crimea, Eastern Ukraine and a nuclear stockpile. The Islamic State governs parts of Iraq. Libya has fallen to Islamic militias. And south Afghanistan was reclaimed by the Taliban.

All these realities are bad for America, he says, and looking at them objectively means that Obama has failed. He then contrasts this view with that of Gideon Rose who wrote that Obama “felt that after a period of reckless overexpansion and belligerent unilateralism, the country's long-term foreign policy goals could best be furthered by short-term retrenchment.”

Does this satisfy our author? No, it does not. And he explains why. He says that whatever the subjective intent of Obama may have been, the law of unintended consequences intervened and spoiled his approach. Instead of these people embracing liberal democracy, they remain where they were or have gotten worse. To explain how this came about, he quotes James Burnham who wrote the following in 1941:

“Human beings try to achieve various goals. They take steps that will aid in reaching the goal in question [but] experience teaches us not merely that the goals are often not reached but that the effect of the steps taken is frequently toward a very different result from the goal which was originally held in mind and which motivated the taking of the steps in the first place.”

Thus, Continetti reasons that “experience has taught Obama nothing.” So the question: is this a valid deduction, or is there something wrong with it?

The answer is that there is something wrong with it. That's because Gideon Rose wrote about a period of reckless overexpansion and belligerent unilateralism that extends far into the past. Because experience teaches us that doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result defines insanity, President Obama chose the sane route of trying something different.

The result may not have been the instantaneous embracing of the democratic principles by the world, but America remains in demand almost everywhere under Obama. That's in sharp contrast to the situation under a previous administration where America's standing was the same as toxic trash. Before that, it used to be “Yankee go home” and “Gringo get out of here” and “the problem with them is that they are overpaid, over sexed and over here.”

Thus, the only valid deduction that can be made is that the current President or a future one will be welcomed in many places around the world should he or she decide that the time has come for America to get involved. And that must be a better alternative than to flee a place by helicopters taking off the rooftop of an American embassy where America was kicked in the ass and humiliated.

The situation now is the same as when America was reluctant to get involved before the two great wars of the twentieth century. When America finally got involved, it won and was respected as well as loved by friend and foe alike. This is the history from which to learn, not Vietnam or Iraq 2 or Somalia or Libya.