Nice job, Mr. President, as you have been hearing, but now let us see what you’ve learned. As of now, you stand poised between the morass in Libya and the impressive success of the strike at Osama bin Laden, which make you seem like two different people who stand for two different poles.
In Libya, you attempted to “lead from behind;” with bin Laden, you were all forward motion. In Libya, you were pushed into the fray by external parties and tried to seem passive; with bin Laden, it was you who provided the impetus.
With bin Laden, the objective was perfectly clear and the use of force clearly geared to it; in Libya, the objective wasn’t distinct, and when it was, you backed away from the force needed to make it all happen.
In Libya, it was all about coalitions, which were as large as was possible, and seemed to overwhelm the objective itself. The idea was that the coalition gave the mission legitimacy, which it otherwise would be lacking. With the strike at bin Laden, there was none of this stuff, just the belief that success is its own justification.
“Unilateralism works,” writes the AEI’s Michael Rubin. “Multilateralism might bring some artificial sense of legitimacy and might give diplomats something to do, but there’s no multilateral substitute for a mission accomplished.”
With Libya, the mission was no sooner announced than you began talking about how small your part was, how soon you would leave, and how you were a small, very small, part of the process. With the attack on bin Laden, it was, like a Toby Keith ballad, “USA all the way.”
“Let’s be clear: This is an AMERICAN victory,” says the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin (no relation to the gentleman from AEI), “a triumph shared by two presidents and a magnificent accomplishment for all the military and intelligence officials who worked to see this day.”
Take the bin Laden route, and you may revive that old species, the now-extinct liberal hawk. Back in their great days, it was legal for Democrats to be neocons, and most of them were. Foreign policy divided the parties themselves, not from one another.
Interventionists before World War II included New Dealers, bankers and captains of industry, while most isolationists were socialists, pacifists and the more extreme right-wing cranks.
Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson, Lane Kirkland all were anti-Communists. John Kennedy was to the right of Nixon and Eisenhower on foreign policy. Franklin Roosevelt may have said “I hate war,” but not so much that he couldn’t wage it with vigor.
In despair through the late 1930s because he couldn’t effect regime change in Germany, he planned the Security Council as a police force to pre-empt aggressive dictatorships. On Dec. 8, 1941, he went before Congress to tell it “the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Democrats today aren’t used to this language. It would be nice if they said it again.
A lot depends, therefore, on what you do now. If this is an inflection point, and you become Reaganesque, you’ll get a permanent bump that will carry you though 2012 and beyond. If it’s a one-off, and you revert to Jimmy Carter, it can fade fairly fast.
Put “lead from behind” back in the box that it came in; it’s a paradox and punch line, not a doctrine. By the way, if you really want to put a quick end to the birthers, just keep on acting like an American president.
Succeed, and no one would care if you did come from Kenya. It’s your call, sir. Good luck.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
