“Mission Re-launched” is the cover story on this week’s Economist. The cover illustration shows President Obama — the peace-lover, the man who ran against war, the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize for nothing in particular — morphed into George W. Bush on an aircraft carrier, circa 2003.
“Close your eyes and listen to Wednesday’s speech with a Texas accent, and you might feel like you’re having a flashback,” wrote Carrie Budoff Brown in Politico, speaking for many, and noting that Obama “often sounded like he had a ghost writer: the predecessor he mocked.” This is the final outcome and irony of the post-9/11 era: Barack W. Bush, the nation’s most reluctant war-leader president ever, is belatedly and reluctantly reporting for duty, having left himself no other choice.
He is going back not only to war, but a bigger and uglier war than the one that Bush had started, and worse than Iraq at its depth. Charles Lane on Fox News likened his fate to what one might find in Shakespearean drama. It is in reality closer to Oedipus Rex, whose characters, by their own actions, bring about precisely the dreadful fate they had hoped to prevent.
This has happened before within modern memory. In the l930s the French, British, and to some extent the Americans were so stunned by the Great War and its carnage that their aversion to war invited a worse one to happen. The fact is that Obama is a war president now because he tried so hard not to be one; because he “ended” wars before they were over, refused to use force when it was needed, and discarded the principle that has guided American presidents since World War II: That the use or the threat of armed power has always upheld moral order, because people who don’t care about morals or order have always been willing enough to use force.
The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, sounding like a neoconservative now that George W. Bush has moved back to Texas, invokes the “broken windows” theory of local police work, which is that clamping down hard on smaller infringements of order prevent large ones from happening by showing that someone’s in charge. “Obama could not see a connection between ignoring his own ‘red line’ in Syria and what would follow,” he tells us. “The issue was not to remove chemical weapons from Syria, but to make an American president’s word matter.”
What the world took from this episode was that Obama didn’t much care. Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and moved in on Ukraine. Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq and refusal to aid the rebels in Syria created a vacuum in which the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria flourished. And so we are back to where we began on Sept. 11, 2001, only in a much worse and much weaker position, and with all of our gains washed away.
Obama seems to think (or to have thought, it’s no longer that certain) that without the force of American power, the world on its own runs just fine. He is fond of a Martin Luther King quotation, which he modifies to say that “the arc of history bends toward justice.” And he is right about this, but it only bends when people like King do the bending, and when other people, like presidents, call out the National Guard. If not for Churchill and Roosevelt, and their bombs and armed forces, the arc of history in the 1940s would have bent toward terror.
Has this at last taught Obama that if he doesn’t take charge, the arc of the world on his watch will dip into darkness? Let us hope beyond hope that it has.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
