woensdag 16 februari 2011

Obama 214

Niall Ferguson Blasts Obama's Foreign Policy

  •  

Newsweek's new columnist makes his debut in this week's issue with a cover story on Obama's Egypt debacle and the strategic vacuum it exposes in the White House.
"The statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all." Thus Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman who united Germany and thereby reshaped Europe's balance of power nearly a century and a half ago.
Last week, for the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic opportunity… and missed it completely.

In Bismarck's case, it was not so much God's coattails he caught as the revolutionary wave of mid-19th-century German nationalism. And he did more than catch it; he managed to surf it in a direction of his own choosing. The wave Obama just missed—again—is the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy. It has surged through the region twice since he was elected: once in Iran in the summer of 2009, the second time right across North Africa, from Tunisia all the way down the Red Sea to Yemen. But the swell has been biggest in Egypt, the Middle East's most populous country.
In each case, the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave, Bismarck style, by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail. In the case of Iran, he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations. This time around, in Egypt, it was worse. He did both—some days exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, other days drawing back and recommending an "orderly transition."
The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak's cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever ultimately wins, Obama loses. And the alienation doesn't end there. America's two closest friends in the region—Israel and Saudi Arabia—are both disgusted. The Saudis, who dread all manifestations of revolution, are appalled at Washington's failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak. The Israelis, meanwhile, are dismayed by the administration's apparent cluelessness.
The defining characteristic of Obama's foreign policy has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to recognize the need to do so.
Article - Ferguson Obama EgyptNewsweek; Bloomberg / Getty Images
Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo's Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy.
• Mike Giglio: Egypt’s Facebook Freedom Fighter

• Christopher Dickey: Hosni Mubarak’s Final Tragedy

• Peter Beinart: America’s Proud Egypt Moment
This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration's lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign-policymaking have long worried. The president himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth and upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy issues.
Yet no president can be expected to be omniscient. That is what advisers are for. The real responsibility for the current strategic vacuum lies not with Obama himself, but with the National Security Council, and in particular with the man who ran it until last October: retired Gen. James L. Jones. I suspected at the time of his appointment that General Jones was a poor choice. A big, bluff Marine, he once astonished me by recommending that Turkish troops might lend the United States support in Iraq. He seemed mildly surprised when I suggested the Iraqis might resent such a reminder of centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule.

5 opmerkingen:

Jan Verheul zei

Ferguson schrijft: "The Iranian revolution of 1979, which took the Carter administration wholly by surprise, was a catastrophe far greater than the loss of South Vietnam."

Ik heb Engdahl's 'A century at War" gelezen, en daarin staat dat de VS de Shah heeft laten vallen.
Hij wilde een beter olie-contract. Hij wilde kern-energie. Hij had al olie-leverantie contacten met heelandere klanten dan de VS.
Dat alles zag men niet zitten.

De islamoloog Berhard Lewis had de VS ( en deBilderberg-vergadering)overtuigd dat het goed zou zijn als de arabische landen in religieus-fundamentalistische achtergebleven regio's zouden uiteenvallen.
Dat gaf de communisten de minste kans. ( En liet de olie-handelaren vrij spel, denk ik ook.)
Een hoge VS ambtenaar , Bell, heeft dit alles uitgewerkt en bepleit.

De val van de shah was mede door inzet van de VS.
Dat die Ayatollah minder meegaand bleek dan verwacht, dàt zal wel een verrassing zijn geweest, maar had ook te maken met de bezetting van de ambassade door pro-communistische studenten.
Khomeiny kon niet meer pro VS zijn, want dan zou hij een communistische machtsgreep hebben bevorderd.
Deze video zegt hetzelfde, maar gebruikt het om carter te bashen, omdat hij kritisch op Israel is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWfxx149RaY&feature=player_embedded

Sonja zei

Over de schrijver in Wikipedia:

Ferguson is a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and an advisory fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas.

In May 2010 he announced that the Education Secretary in the U.K's newly elected Conservative/Lib Dem government had invited him to write a new history syllabus—"history as a connected narrative"— for schools in England and Wales.

In 2007, Ferguson was appointed as an Investment Management Consultant by GLG Partners, focusing on geopolitical risk as well as current structural issues in economic behaviour relating to investment decisions.[7] GLG is a UK-based hedge fund management firm headed by Noam Gottesman.

He is married to journalist Susan Douglas, whom he met in 1987 when she was his editor at the Daily Mail. They have three children. In February 2010 the Daily Mail reported that, following a series of affairs, Ferguson had left his wife for former Dutch MP and feminist critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A similar story in The Independent was followed by the publication of a correction, noting that Ferguson's marriage had broken down before he met Ali.

Anoniem zei

Vreemd (ahum) dat Ferguson niet schrijft over die andere grote "strategische visie": Bush jr, 2000-2008. Waarschijnlijk is het zo dat Ferguson het niet eens is met de strategie die Obama volgt. Waarschijnlijk had hij gewoon een oorlog gewild in Egypte om Mubaraks regime te handhaven.

Maar nog groter is dat andere waar hij niet op ingaat. Hij zit bij de Herzliya "security conference" in Israel (Hirsi Ali en Rosenthal waren er ook), en schrijft niet over het Israelische strategisch belang bij het vorige regime. Weer zo'n columnist die de VS weer een oorlog voor Israel wil laten voeren. Dat noemt hij "visie".

En heeft hij het boek over Bismarck niet uitgelezen? Weet hij dan niet hoe die "visie" afliep?

eGast

stan zei

exact egast. hij wil oorlog, zo wordt het verkocht.

Anoniem zei

Sonja,
De ster van Ferguson is behoorlijk groot. Hoe dat komt weet ik niet. Misschien omdat hij bereid is om de geschiedenis een beetje te vervalsen.
Hij heeft twee boeken over de Rothschilds geschreven.
Dat is volgens hem 'vergane glorie'.
Daar twijfel ik aan. De Rothschilds zijn waarschijnlijk rond 1900 'onder de radar ' gegaan.
J P Morgan was absoluut de rijkste en grootste bankier van de VS. Hij financieerde de hele WO1 voor de engelsen en de fransen. Maar bij zijn overlijden bleek dat Rothschild voor 81% eigenaar was van JP Morgan.
Volgens de biograaf van Morgan: (citaat)

"Morgan biographer George Wheeler wrote in 1973, “Part
of the reality of the day was an ugly resurgence of anti-Semitism. . . .
Someone was needed as a cover.” August Belmont (born Schoenberg)
had played that role for Rothschild during the Civil War; but when
the Belmont/Rothschild connection became common knowledge, the
ploy no longer worked. Wheeler wrote, “Who better than J. Pierpont
Morgan, a solid, Protestant exemplar of capitalism able to trace his
family back to pre-Revolutionary times?"

Ayaan werkt voor het AEI, wat tegenwoordig een joodse belangen-organisatie is.
Ik denk dat Ferguson ook een lobbyist is die officieel een gevierd wetenschapper is.

Meer info: www.xevolutie.blogspot.com

Jan Verheul

Peter Flik en Chuck Berry-Promised Land

mijn unieke collega Peter Flik, die de vrijzinnig protestantse radio omroep de VPRO maakte is niet meer. ik koester duizenden herinneringen ...