Thomas Barnett: Two Humiliating Whiffs for Krauthammer

Thomas P.M. Barnett: Two humiliating whiffs for Krauthammer: Krauthammer['s]... scolding of Obama comes off as weak and ill-informed, making graduate student mistakes that betray a lifetime of learning through others instead of actual experience. We are told Obama's answer on meeting baddies without preconditions would put the country at risk by making situations worse. Then the killer put-down:

Moreover, summits can also be traps if they're not wired in advance for success, such as Nixon's trip to China, for which Henry Kissinger had already largely hammered out the famous Shanghai communique. You don't go hoping for the best.

Bullshit on several levels, because that's exactly what the Nixon team did: they went hoping for the best. Remember the timeframe: We're sinking on Vietnam, Nixon's under attack at home from war protestors, and Mao's nuttier than a fruitcake, debilitated by all sorts of maladies and still in a buzz over the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, which he could have revived at a moment's notice. Proof? Imagine Zhou does not come to greet Nixon at the airport. Imagine no televised state dinner. Imagine no F2F with Mao. Think the Shanghai communique would have saved the summit? Only the perpetual grad student would swallow that nonsense.

First, the Shanghai communique is hardly "famous" or consequential. Like most communiques, it contained a lot of platitudes signifying nothing. It was not what constituted the success of Nixon's trip. If you got the graduate student history book on the subject, you might have come to that conclusion, but read Margaret McMillan's great When Nixon Met Mao and tell me that trip was "wired" to be an automatic success. Nixon's entire mania across the week was the photo-ops, not the communique. It was the symbolism of the trip: Who would meet him at the airport? Would he get to meet Mao? How would the toasts go?

Second, none of this was "wired" and all came down to last-minute scheming and finessing, all well captured in this book that shows that people make foreign policy, not organizations. You read your average grad-level foreign policy history and its a load of impersonal forces. You actually live through any of it, and it's all personal and amazingly so. The main reason why I wanted to pen a history from inside of what it was like to participate in the formulation of the Navy white paper "From the Sea ..." is because the grad-level versions were so comically off the mark, with great man Admiral Snuffy Smith bequeathing the entire document, fully-formed, like some grand strategy Zeus, out of his head. The truth was messy, very personal, and full of all sorts of accidents and feuds and semi-goofy stuff. The neatness factor simply wasn't there. Nixon's performance made that summit, as did Zhou's. The communique is what the wonks swoon over in retrospect, but pretending that constituted the success of that summit is truly grad-level analysis.

The second whiff?

Obama enthusiasts might want to write this off as a solitary slip. Except that this was the second time. The first occurred in another unscripted moment. During the April 26 South Carolina candidates' debate, Brian Williams asked what kind of change in the U.S. military posture abroad Obama would order in response to a hypothetical al-Qaida strike on two American cities.

Obama's answer: "Well, the first thing we would have to do is make sure that we've got an effective emergency response--something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans."

Asked to be commander in chief, Obama could only play first-responder in chief. Caught off guard, and without his advisers, he simply slipped into two automatic talking points: emergency response and its corollary--the obligatory Katrina Bush-bash.

When the same question came to Hillary, she again pounced: "I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate."

So let me get this straight in this, the great asymmetrical struggle of our age: our strength is not found in our ability to withstand and mitigate attacks but in symmetrical--and often knee-jerk--retaliation against state-less enemies?

Talk about a grad student answer right out of the 20th century! Somebody is definitely beyond his analytical expiration date.

Our resilience is our deterrence in the 21st century. If you don't get that, you shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of power in a moment of danger. If your answer is just to pull triggers to get your rocks off as quickly as possible, you might as well hand over power to the bin Ladens right now, because our future foreign policy will consist merely of those guys plucking our strings.

I say, go to the back of the class and write Robb's book out in chalk a couple of times til something different sinks in.

Krauthammer ends this embarrassing display of sophomoric analysis with the specter of America sharing the stage--unwittingly--with a "malevolent clown like Hugo Chavez."

Good God Almighty!

That's what we've come to after 8 years of Bush? Living in fear of Chavez?

Nixon sits down with Mao, a guy who killed about 80 million, but we're supposed to fear treading anywhere near the fantastically evil Chavez?

What kind of midget superpower does Krauthammer fear we've become that he's so entranced by such imagery?

Just chalk it up to another Boomer (and former Mondale speechwriter) infatuated with visuals over reality, armed with his graduate-level understanding of both history and the complexity of the world we now live in.

Comments

[David]

Do you really think gutter language and sophomoric insults make you more persuasive? If you think Krauthammer is wrongheaded, try pointing out the flaws without egregious insults.

[And you think Tom Barnett is substantively wrong because...?]

[Ken Houghton]

I was going to note that the text insults the acumen of history grad students, but that's Barnett's normal style.

On substance, of course, he's spot on. If you're afraid of Hugo Chavez, how do you stand up to Prince Bandar? Oh, right, you hold hands and hope he doesn't hurt you...