Watching
the twists and turns of American foreign policy while reading
Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914"
is an unnerving experience.
Clark's history, unlike many on the outbreak of World War I, starts not
with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in
June 1914, but a dozen or so years earlier. He examines the muddled
internal politics behind the foreign policies of major and minor powers
-- and how often they were incomprehensible to each other.
He also shows how different powers formed shifting and sometimes
unlikely alliances, with fateful consequences. Britain ended her
longtime enmity with France in the 1904 entente cordiale and broke with
the Ottoman Empire to join her "Great Game" rival, Russia.
Have we been watching something similar in our own time? Barack Obama
brought to the presidency a different approach than the post-Cold War
stances of his two predecessors.
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, in different ways, maintained support
for America's longstanding allies while gingerly seeking rapprochement
with former enemies Russia and China.
With China they established strong trade and financial ties, while
discouraging Chinese military aggressiveness. When China shelled the
waters off Taiwan in 1996, Clinton sent in the 6th Fleet.
Clinton cooperated with Boris Yeltsin until he flamed out in 1999. Bush
found that his initial faith in Vladimir Putin was ill-founded.
Barack Obama has put a radically different stamp on American foreign
policy. Conservative critics perhaps exaggerate, but are on to
something, when they characterize him as disrespecting America's
traditional friends and truckling to longtime enemies.
The pattern has become more pronounced in Obama's second term. He is
making good on his promise to Putin to have "more flexibility."
In his first term, he blindsided allies by canceling missile defense
sites in Poland and the Czech Republic to appease Putin. In this term,
he didn't lift a finger when Putin successfully blocked Ukraine from
establishing closer economic ties with the European Union.
In his first term, he one-upped the Palestinians by demanding that
Israel stop building settlements (including additions on houses) in East
Jerusalem. More recently, he supported the Muslim Brotherhood
government in Egypt as a step toward democracy until it was toppled by
the military.
In his first term, he called for the ouster of Syria's Assad regime and
said that its use of chemical weapons would be crossing a "red line."
In his second term, he let the red line be crossed and allowed Putin to
stage-manage Syria's agreement to relinquish the weapons.
In the process, the United States has abandoned attempts to depose
Assad and now depends on his good faith to locate the weapons -- a
victory for Putin and Assad's allies in Iran.
Obama's sharp reversals on Syria have been echoed by contradictory
responses to China's declaration of an expanded Air Defense
Identification Zone in the East China Sea, covering the Senkaku Islands
owned by Japan but claimed by China.
Obama promptly ordered B-52s to fly through the ADIZ without notifying
China. But the Federal Aviation Administration also told U.S. airlines
to inform China when flying through this airspace. Japan and South Korea
took a contrary stance.
Vice President Joe Biden, visiting China last week, expressed deep
concern about the ADIZ and warned against armed clashes that could
result. But he did not demand it be scrapped.
The November agreement with Iran, concluded after months of undisclosed
U.S.-Iran negotiations, suspended sanctions for six months, but did not
require the dismemberment of centrifuges demanded in previous United
Nations resolutions.
America's traditional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, have made no
secret of their opposition to this agreement. They fear a nuclear Iran
dominating their region.
The American Interest's Walter Russell Mead sees the emergence of an
unlikely Israeli-Saudi alliance against Iran, Russia and China, which he
calls the "Central Powers" -- the term used for Germany's allies in
World War I.
Today's Central Powers, he writes, are seeking to diminish U.S. power
in the Middle East and East Asia, with some success. The U.S. is
abandoning friends in the hope of reducing hostility from enemies.
Sudden reversals of policy, shifting alliances, secret negotiations --
these are reminiscent of Christopher Clark's statesmen who sleepwalked
into World War I. Let's hope that clashes over Asian islets or Iranian
centrifuges don't have the kind of consequences as that terrorist murder
in Sarajevo did 99 years ago.
