Mar 25th 2014

What today’s GOP gets Wrong about Leadership: Obama & Eisenhower, Russian & Israeli Recklessness

by Juan Cole

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Commentwebsite.

The usual suspects have been slamming President Obama for an alleged lack of leadership. Trolls for the military-industrial complex like Charles Krauthammer, and megalomaniacs from tiny states like Sen. Lindsey Graham have constructed a narrative in which Obama willfully withdrew from Iraq, giving it away to Iran; has been insufficiently slavish in his devotion to the ruling Israeli Likud Party; and then declined to bomb Syria, allowing a diplomatic solution to its chemical weapons stores; and now is dithering while Russia occupies Crimea. Graham, for whom surely a small minority of his state’s 4 million people actually voted, snarkily advised Obama to cease threatening action against foreign challengers: “It’s not your strong suit.” (I wonder how Osama Bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi would feel about that allegation; and, remember that Graham’s big foreign policy idea was to illegally invade and occupy Iraq). All this adds up, the war-hawks insist, to weakness on Obama’s part.

Much of what they say is just posturing, and makes no sense. It was George W. Bush who turned Iraq from a bastion of Sunni Arab secular nationalism that served as a bulwark against Shiite Iran into a natural ally of Iran. It was Bush who overthrew the secular Baath Party and enabled the takeover of Iraq by the Islamic Call (Da’wa) Party, which aims at a Shiite state. It was Bush who failed to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi parliament that would allow US troops to remain after December 2011 (as if their remaining would anyway have been a good idea). And remember that all those things Bush did were war crimes, which the hawks are lamenting Obama has not committed enough of.

Although this chorus demanding forceful “leadership” is largely from the Republican Party, they do not actually represent the positions of that party as it was constituted in saner days. Their bromides could as well be applied to President Dwight D. Eisenhower as to Obama.

So when in late 1956 Moscow crushed the Hungarian uprising, President Eisenhower could do little about it. He concentrated on helping Hungarian refugees. Privately, his heart went out to “captive peoples” whom he wanted to rescue from foreign domination (including, by the way, the Algerians laboring under French colonialism). But he was unwilling to risk WW III over Moscow’s assertion that Hungary was its sphere of influence.

Dwight Eisenhower was among America’s most distinguished military and civilian leaders and had been Supreme Allied Commander during WW II. He defeated Hitler. He was not a wimp, to say the least. And Lindsey Graham and Charles Krauthammer are not good enough to wipe his shoes. And yet his response to Moscow’s troop movements in Hungary was no more robust than Obama’s to Russian troops in Crimea. Indeed, because the Soviet Union was economically disengaged from the capitalist world system, Eisenhower had fewer levers against it than Obama’s proposed sanctions on today’s Russia, which has bought into capitalist oligarchy like everyone else. (The Russian stock market has lashed Vladimir Putin, itself, quite apart from other sanctions; warmongering is usually bad for the economy.)

Obama is not enamored of the militant Greater Israel policy of the ruling Likud Party, which is engaged in a gradual annexation of the Palestinian West Bank and its colonization by Israeli squatters. He has sought to pressure Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to negotiate in good faith with the Palestinians, whom Netanyahu seeks to keep permanently stateless and without rights. He recently warned that a time is coming when the US can no longer protect Israel from international sanctions for its illegal actions against the Palestinians. Netanyahu came to the White House on Monday [Mars 3] and essentially told Obama that he would not budge on his West Bank policy of land theft and squatting. (Why the US should protect Netanyahu from UNSC sanctions at all is mysterious; what is the difference between Russia in the Crimea and Israel in the Palestinian West Bank? Yet Obama wants to sanction Putin.)

As for Eisenhower, he was outraged by the aggressive war launched jointly by Britain, France and Israel against Egypt in late October 1956, and he put enormous pressure on Israel to withdraw from Sinai. I wrote elsewhere:

“The United Nations was established in 1945 in the wake of a series of aggressive wars of conquest and the response to them, in which over 60 million people perished. Its purpose was to forbid such unjustified attacks, and its charter specified that in future wars could only be launched on two grounds. One is clear self-defense, when a country has been attacked. The other is with the authorization of the United Nations Security Council.

It was because the French, British and Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 contravened these provisions of the United Nations Charter that President Dwight D. Eisenhower condemned that war and forced the belligerents to withdraw. When Israel looked as though it might try to hang on to its ill-gotten spoils, the Sinai Peninsula, President Eisenhower went on television on February 21, 1957 and addressed the nation. These words have largely been suppressed and forgotten in the United States of today, but they should ring through the decades and centuries:

“If the United Nations once admits that international dispute can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the very foundation of the organization, and our best hope of establishing a real world order. That would be a disaster for us all . . .

[Referring to Israeli demands that certain conditions be met before it relinquished the Sinai, the president said that he] “would be untrue to the standards of the high office to which you have chosen me if I were to lend the influence of the United States to the proposition that a nation which invades another should be permitted to exact conditions for withdrawal . . .”

“If it [the United Nations Security Council] does nothing, if it accepts the ignoring of its repeated resolutions calling for the withdrawal of the invading forces, then it will have admitted failure. That failure would be a blow to the authority and influence of the United Nations in the world and to the hopes which humanity has placed in the United Nations as the means of achieving peace with justice.”

You can only imagine what Charles Krauthammer and Fox Cable News and Lindsey Graham would say about Obama if he gave a similar speech, or took a similar stance, today. Yet Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is no more justified, all these decades after 1967– a war in which Israel fired the first shots– than David Ben Gurion’s occupation of Sinai in 1956-57.

Yet Eisenhower’s handling of both Hungary and the Suez Crisis was the epitome of responsible leadership. He condemned the Soviets and tried to help Hungarian refugees, but did not want to risk nuclear brinkmanship with Moscow. He upheld the standards of the United Nations Charter and acted forcefully against even allies who contravened it with a war of aggression on Egypt an an attempted long-term occupation of Sinai. (At the time the US was a creditor Power, not a debtor nation, and so Eisenhower could threaten to call in loans to Britain, France and Israel, which would have crashed their post-war economies).

It is no accident that Eisenhower warned when going out of office of the pernicious influence of the Military-Industrial Complex. That Complex later captured Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and led them to engage in exactly the kind of illegal and unwise behavior that Eisenhower so forcefully condemned in the 1950s. Those carping at Obama (who is unfortunately not as far left as Eisenhower) are just ventriloquists’ dummies for the Complex that Eisenhower so hated and feared, and which has taken over, as he feared.

Leadership does not consist in flailing around like Reagan, creating private death squads in Afghanistan that morphed into al-Qaeda and the Taliban; nor does it consist in falling wolf-like on other nations that have not attacked us; nor does it consist in supporting allies when they contravene international law. All that is not leadership, it is pandering to the lowest common denominator and it is the height of recklessness.

But Fox Cable News and the inside-the-Beltway chickenhawks wouldn’t recognized mature leadership if it fell on their heads.



Juan Cole runs a site Informed Comment, Toughts on the Middle East, History and Religion - click here.



     

Browse articles by author

More Current Affairs

Apr 13th 2022
EXTRACTS" "Ukraine and Russia produce a substantial amount of grain and other food for export. Ukraine alone produces a whopping 6% of all food calories traded in the international market. At least it used to, before it was invaded by the world’s largest nuclear power." ...... "When it comes to cereals like wheat, corn, rice and barley, the big players talk about millions of metric tonnes, or MMTs. A single MMT of wheat contains about 3.4 trillion food calories,." ....."Ukraine produced about 80 MMT of grain (a category that includes wheat, corn and barley) in 2021, and is expected to harvest less than half of that this year. A shortfall of 40 MMT is enough missing calories that a country like the UK could only make it up by having everyone stop eating for three years. That’s the thing about tonnes of grain: a million here and a million there and pretty soon you’ve got a real issue on your plate."
Apr 11th 2022
EXTRACT: "I don’t even know the little girl’s name. All I do know is what a friend of a friend wrote on Viber: that her relative, a senior nurse in one of Kyiv’s hospitals, “saw in the morgue a child with 20 varieties of sperm on her small body.” Since this information was conveyed in a private conversation, there is no reason to doubt its veracity."
Apr 8th 2022
EXTRACT: "Russian society has so far failed to stop Putin, just as German society failed to stop Hitler. And so, like a poisoned chalice, that task has fallen to the West, as it did in 1939. The West must now treat Putin and his regime the same way that Winston Churchill treated Hitler: Don’t talk to him, just defeat him. Dead-enders such as Putin are too fanatical and desperate to be reliable negotiating partners."
Apr 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "From 1807 to 1814 on the Iberian peninsula, Napoleon had to fight Spanish, Portuguese and British armies while beset by ubiquitous, ferocious insurgents. He described this war as his “bleeding ulcer”, draining him of men and equipment. It is the west’s aim to make Ukraine for Putin what Spain was for Napoleon. In the absence of a negotiated settlement, Ukraine and Nato will continue to grind away at Russia’s army, digging away at that bleeding ulcer and prolonging Russia’s agony on the military front, as the west continues its parallel assault on its economy. If Putin’s plan is to proceed with the Korea model, he will fail. There is a strong possibility that Putin has only a limited idea of how badly his army is faring. So be it – he’ll find out soon enough that there is now no path for him to military victory."
Apr 1st 2022
EXTRACTS: "Policymakers expected that the country would be able to secure its energy supply entirely from renewable sources, so they resolved to phase out coal and nuclear energy simultaneously. The last three of Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants are set to be shut down this year." ---- ".... the share of wind and solar power in Germany’s total final energy consumption, which includes heating, industrial processing, and traffic, was a meager 6.7%. And while wind and solar generated 29% of the country’s electricity output, electricity itself accounted for only about a fifth of its final energy consumption." ----- "If Germany suddenly halted Russian gas imports, gas-based residential heating systems – on which half the German population, approximately 40 million people, rely – and industrial processes that rely heavily on gas imports would break down....."
Apr 1st 2022
EXTRACT: "For Putin, the past that matters most is the one the dissident author and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exalted: the time when the Slavic peoples were united within the Orthodox Christian kingdom of Kievan Rus’. Kyiv formed its heart, making Ukraine central to Putin’s pan-Slavic vision. ---- But, for Putin, the Ukraine war is about preserving Russia, not just expanding it. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently made clear, Russia’s leaders believe that their country is locked in a “life-and-death battle to exist on the world’s geopolitical map.” That worldview reflects Putin’s longstanding obsession with works of other Russian emigrant philosophers, such as Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Berdyaev, who described a struggle for the Eurasian (Russian) soul against the Atlanticists (the West) who would destroy it. ---- Yet Putin and his neo-Eurasianists seem to believe that the key to victory is to create the kind of regime those anti-Bolshevik philosophers most detested: one run by the security forces. A police state would fulfill the vision of another of Putin’s heroes: the KGB chief turned Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov."
Apr 1st 2022
EXTRACTS: "Ukraine, known as the breadbasket of Europe, is struggling to export last year’s harvest, and may be unable to produce much this year either. In addition, the war has caused a global fertiliser shortage, which will push up food prices around the world too. Coming at a time when the global pandemic had already increased food insecurity and depleted resources around the world, many countries may not be resilient to a major food crisis brought on by the war. Back-to-back global catastrophic events like this have not happened for close to 100 years." ----- "Another useful analogue is the case of Germany during the first world war. When war broke out in 1914, the German authorities had anticipated a short conflict – not too dissimilar to Russian assumptions a few weeks ago. Just like in Ukraine now, the first world war severely disrupted German farming."
Mar 31st 2022
EXTRACT: "The horrors of World War II – the death camps, slave labor, and inhumane experiments on people – produced a global commitment never to permit such crimes to be repeated. This began a transformation of international politics whereby appreciation of the value of every person’s life and dignity ensured that even most authoritarian governments at least paid lip service to human rights.  ----- But the Soviet Union and many of its successor states, particularly Russia, never internalized this change. More than three decades after the USSR collapsed, most post-Soviet countries are still governed according to the old “imperial” paradigm. So, it should come as no surprise that we are now witnessing a clash between fundamentally different sets of values and ultimate goals for statehood."
Mar 26th 2022
EXTRACT: "Referencing past legacies as a justification for present-day political decisions is often effective – such appeals trigger emotional reflexes and contribute to thinking about politics in terms of rivalry and defence. The irony within the tragedy of the current situation is that Putin will assuredly go down in history as the figure that did more to unite the Ukrainian people (albeit against Russia) than any other in recent memory."
Mar 24th 2022
EXTRACT: " Despite the death and destruction that Russia rains down daily on them, the vast majority of Ukrainians are bullish about the future: 77% believe the country is moving in the right direction, 93% think they can beat back Russia, and 47% expect to win in the next few weeks.  Ukrainian policymakers are no less bullish, driving a hard bargain in negotiations with the Russians. Several factors account for this remarkable optimism."
Mar 21st 2022
EXTRACT: "As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, China’s role has been thrown into sharp relief. Prior to the war, some commentators suggested that China would openly side with Russia or seek to act as a mediator – so far Beijing appears to have resisted doing either. As Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the US, wrote recently in the Washington Post, Beijing has nothing to gain from this war, arguing “wielding the baton of sanctions at Chinese companies while seeking China’s support and cooperation simply won’t work”. Ambassador Qin also stressed that Beijing had no prior knowledge of the conflict,...."
Mar 17th 2022
EXTRACT: "The second source of Russian power is of course the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Nuclear weapons would not deliver victory in a conventional war, but they could destroy a country in the blink of an eye. This brings us to a terrifying question: What will Putin do when he realizes that he cannot win his war in Ukraine by conventional means?"
Mar 17th 2022
EXTRACT: "An influential Shanghai-based academic commentator on international affairs, Hu Wei, recently advanced a cautionary argument that has been circulated widely in Chinese-language publications. In his commentary, which is unlikely to have been published without the approval of some of Xi’s senior courtiers, Hu wondered how Chinese communists would react if the war escalated beyond Ukraine, or if Russia was clearly defeated." ------- "For Hu, the answer for China’s leaders is simple. They should wash their hands of the relationship with Putin, ....."
Mar 12th 2022
EXTRACT: "Meanwhile, Xi seems to have realized that Putin has gone rogue. On March 8, one day after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had insisted that the friendship between China and Russia remained “rock solid,” Xi called French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to say that he supported their peacemaking efforts."
Mar 7th 2022
EXTRACTS: "........Russia has been isolated by draconian Western sanctions that could devastate its economy for decades,...." ---- "Russia’s prospects are bleak, at best; without China, it has none at all. China holds the trump card in the ultimate survival of Putin’s Russia."
Mar 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "Although Ukraine’s armed forces are outnumbered by those of Russian President Vladimir Putin invading our country, we take heart from the growing support we are receiving from friends abroad. Nobody should forget that this is not just an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine; it is an assault on the free world. ---- Putin has been at war with the free world for decades. "
Mar 2nd 2022
EXTRACT: "Moreover, with China sharing the Kremlin’s interest in containing the advance of liberal democracy around the world, Putin could count on the Chinese to provide an additional economic lifeline by purchasing Russian gas. But this new relationship will not be costless. As the world continues to divide into separate technological and economic blocs, Russia will become even more dependent on China, implying a loss of strategic autonomy. Russia may have a powerful military; but with a GDP similar to that of Spain and Italy, it is far from being an economic power."
Mar 1st 2022
EXTRACT: "The financial measures just announced against Russia are unprecedented for a country of its size. This of course means it’s impossible to predict exactly how their impacts will reverberate around the Russian – and global – economy. And we still need to see the exact details of the plan. But on their face they threaten the collapse of the Russian ruble, a run on Russian banks, hyperinflation, a sharp recession and high levels of unemployment in Russia, as well as turmoil in international financial markets."
Feb 26th 2022
EXTRACT: "Putin apparently assumes that China will back him. But while he launched the invasion just weeks after concluding something akin to an alliance agreement with Xi in Beijing, Chinese officials’ reactions have been very distant with calls for “restraint.” Given Putin’s near-total reliance on China for support in challenging the US-led international order, lying to Xi would have no political or strategic advantage. That is what is so worrying: Putin no longer seems capable of the calculations that are supposed to guide a leader’s decision-making. Far from an equal partner, Russia is now on track to become a kind of Chinese vassal state."
Feb 25th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Russia’s ascent to global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resulted in numerous tragedies not only for the neighbors it subjugated and gradually absorbed, but also for its own people. China’s current leaders, in particular, should be mindful of this history, considering that imperial Russia seized more territory from China than from anyone else." ----- "Putin is taking Russia hurtling back toward the nineteenth century, in search of past greatness, whereas China is forging ahead to become the defining superpower of the twenty-first century. While China has achieved unprecedentedly rapid economic and technological modernization, Putin has been pouring Russia’s energy-export revenues into the military, once again cheating the Russian people out of their future."