Mead's Dishonest Polemic

The idea that Obama spent his eight years “appeasing and apologizing” while an “axis” of revisionists emerged is nothing but lazy propaganda from a bad analyst.

Walter Russell Mead sells a pack of lies:

President Barack Obama was the Great Denialist in geopolitics, temporizing and tap dancing, appeasing and apologizing as an axis of anti-American revisionist powers consisting of China, Russia, Iran and their satellites stepped up their resistance and began to coordinate policies.

If anyone is being a revisionist here, it’s Mead with his wildly distorted description of Obama’s foreign policy record. Obama got many things wrong as president from Libya to Yemen, but the idea that he spent his eight years “appeasing and apologizing” while an “axis” of revisionists emerged is nothing but lazy propaganda from a bad analyst. The old lie of Obama’s imaginary “apology tour” is still with us almost fifteen years later, and it is even more ridiculous now than it was then.

Obama made some big mistakes, but his efforts at diplomatic engagement with adversaries were not among them. While it is vilified today, the “reset” with Russia was a modest success. That policy genuinely improved U.S.-Russian relations at the same time that it lowered tensions with Russia’s neighbors, and it secured some real benefits for the United States on the arms control front. The last surviving arms control treaty, New START, is all that remains now of that effort, and we will miss it when it expires in a few years with nothing to replace it. There was no “appeasing or apologizing” going on here.

Coming on the heels of the August 2008 war that began fifteen years ago this week, Obama’s “reset” policy was a desperately needed correction to the blundering stupidity of the Bush years. The real shame of the “reset” is that one of Obama’s worst policies, the intervention in Libya, helped to kill nascent U.S.-Russian cooperation before it had had much of a chance to work. If you want to blame Obama for something, blame him for the truly stupid decision to go to war in Libya and all the evils that created in Libya and beyond.

Obama’s engagement with Iran was even more successful than the “reset” with Russia in some respects, and it ended up producing what was arguably the most significant and extensive nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated. The nuclear deal was subjected to years of relentless attacks from hawkish clowns, and gradually the hawks managed to wreck it, but it was a major diplomatic success for the United States while it lasted. The nuclear deal was anything but appeasement of Iran. On the contrary, it was Iran that made steep, up-front concessions to more powerful states in exchange for nothing more than being allowed to access their own money and engage in normal trade again.

Among other nonsensical claims that Mead makes in his column is that “Iran built up a regional empire while Washington dreamed beautiful dreams.” If you have no idea what Mead is talking about, that’s all right, because he is simply making things up as he tends to do. To the extent that Iran enjoyed greater influence in the Middle East at the start of Obama’s presidency than it did at the start of the century, that was the result of the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing chaos that it unleashed. Iran doesn’t really have a “regional empire,” but its network of allies and proxies grew like mustard during the Bush presidency and it did so as a direct result of U.S. and U.S.-backed client actions. Whatever influence Iran enjoyed in the 2010s, the foundation for it had already been laid by the architects of the Iraq war.

Whenever a hawkish analyst accuses a political leader of appeasement, that is an obvious giveaway that he is writing a dishonest polemic. Using the a-word is a good sign that the writer has no argument and has to resort to insults and smears. Anyone that reads and believes Mead’s column will come away with a warped and deficient understanding of U.S. foreign policy.

The purpose of all these lies and distortions is to try to stoke fear about the “heating” of the “global political climate” and to agitate for even more aggressive policies that are guaranteed to contribute to rising tensions. Mead wants more brain-dead, hardline policies on every front, and to that end he has to trash successful diplomatic engagement that improved relations with adversaries and peacefully resolved some outstanding disputes. He doesn’t seem to grasp that the U.S. has contributed to the rising tensions that he refers to, and it has done so by pursuing the confrontational courses of action that he prefers. Confronted with what he claims are dangerously rising temperatures, his solution is to start burning the equivalent of the dirtiest coal around.