I wonder what Victor Davis Hanson was trying to accomplish
when he wrote the article that he did under the title: “How Barack Obama's
Foreign Policy De-Stabilized the World,” published on May 19, 2016 in National
Review Online. He begins by making a comparison between what he says is the
current situation in the world, and the events of the late 1930s as he
understands them. But did he miss something?
Look here, my friend ... the purpose of writing an article
of this kind is to say: these are the good guys and these are the bad guys of
today. Also, these are the good guys and these are the bad guys of yesterday.
You then proceed to show that the bad guys of today are acting like the bad
guys of yesterday. As well, you show that the good guys of today are responding
as did the good guys of yesterday. This done, you conclude that today's good
guys will win the confrontation because the good guys of yesterday did.
Now we ask: Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys
today. As well: who were the good guys and who were the bad guys yesterday
according to Victor Hanson? The answer is that in today's world, the good guys
are America and its allies,
whereas the bad guys are Russia
and its allies. In the Hanson comparison, they correspond to Britain and France who were the good guys then;
and to Hitler's Nazis who were the bad guys then.
Okay, we get it. This leads us to the next question: what
did the good guys do yesterday? They warned Hitler of serious consequences if
the did something stupid. Great! So now, we draw the comparison. Who warned
whom today? According to Victor Hanson, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians
and the North Koreans did the warning. Whom did they warn? They warned America . Pow!
Phew! Drum roll please. Here it is in black and white; according to Victor
Davis Hanson, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians and the North Koreans are
today's good guys whereas America, together with her allies are the bad guys.
But wait a minute; did Hanson really mean to say that? No,
he did not. What he did, however, was to begin the discussion along a line that
would have logically led him to the above conclusion … but only if he followed
a straight line of thinking. He did not do that, however, choosing instead to
follow a pretzel-like path.
For that contortion to work, Hanson built a case based on
two premises. The first consists of attributing very bad things to the bad
guys, thus make them look really bad. The second consists of demonstrating that
America
– which is today's good guy – was the first to issue a warning. It did so to Syria , a bad guy that is allied with Russia . The
problem is that America
did not follow through with that warning, thus lost both credibility and
deterrence. This has been Hanson's point all along. Put simply, his logic goes
like this: Don't blame America
for the fiasco, blame Barack Obama who warned Syria then failed to bomb the thing
into the Stone Age.
And here is how Hanson made the bad guys look really bad:
“Such apocalyptic rhetoric follows months of Russian
bullying … harassment of U.S.
ships and planes, and constant threats to the Baltic States … China 's
artificial island and military base plopped down in the sea to control
international sea lanes … Iranian leaders threatening to close down the
Straight of Hormuz. North
Korea upping its usual unhinged bombast to
new levels … All saber-rattling to sound like the boasts and bullying of
Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany”.
What comes out of all this is that the world is not just
full of bad guys; it is full of dangerous guys who would destroy it if we let
them, says Hanson. That is, all that will happen if America weakens to a point it can
no longer maintain order. We are close to living this situation, he says,
because Barack Obama let it happen. He did so by insulting America 's
traditional allies, and resetting things with her traditional enemies, says
Hanson.
To buttress this view, he creates mythologies; one being
that Israel has formed an
alliance with longtime enemies in the Persian Gulf .
This is a fantasy because the reality is that Egypt ,
which has a peace treaty with Israel ,
proposed to mediate a new round of peace negotiations between Palestine
and Israel .
So how did the latter respond? The current government brought into the cabinet
Avigdor Lieberman, the nut case who says he wants to throw the Palestinians
into the sea and the desert, and wants to bomb the Aswan Dam to flood Egypt and kill
millions.
This is the kind of world that Victor Davis Hanson wants to
live in because what will happen otherwise, he says, is that the bad guys will
reason that if Donald Trump were to be elected president, they will not know
what he'll do next. Because of this uncertainty, they will try to cash in on
their good luck under Obama rather than wait and be surprised next year.