After a week of foreign policy disasters, President Obama's entire program is adrift - 28-Sep-2009 - Generational Dynamics

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 28-Sep-2009

After a week of foreign policy disasters, President Obama's entire program is adrift

Obama's first term is indistinguishable from Bush's "third term."

I've been extremely critical of President Obama's policies, and the core of my criticism, which I first wrote about almost four years ago in "Barack Obama to Boomers: Drop dead!", is that Obama's world view is based on his contempt, typical of Generation-Xers, for the values and accomplishments of those in the Boomer and Silent generations.

According to Obama, Americans are sick of feuding Boomers, and ready to turn to Generation X, "after the campus culture wars between freaks and straights, and after young people had given up on what überboomer Hillary Rodham Clinton called in a 1969 commencement address a search for 'a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.' ... In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage."

In that same article I quoted Democratic advisor Paul Begala as saying, "I hate the Baby Boomers. They're the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history."

Obama and Begala are both Generation-Xers, and their contempt for and hatred of Boomers is typical of their generation. Boomers, growing up after the trauma of WW II, received a great deal of love, attention and privileges from their parents. By the time the Gen-Xers came along, growing up in the 60s and 70s, they didn't receive anything like the same level of attention, and came to have the attitudes expressed by Obama and Begala in the quotes above.

During the election campaign, Obama could say anything he wanted, as long as he criticized President Bush. He would receive wildly enthusiastic cheers from his supporters no matter what the content of his speech. As I wrote in July, 2008, in "Barack Obama in Berlin calls for greater European militarism," it was clear that the people, in America and Europe, who were wildly cheering Obama had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. They were cheering a fantasy Obama, not the real Obama standing before them.

Standing in front of an audience that cheers wildly no matter what you say is a like a drug-induced euphoria. You become addicted to the drug, you crave it more and more, and you begin to believe that the wild cheering is for the real you, not the fantasy in their minds. Thus, the fantasies held by the audience are transferred to the mind of the speaker like a kind of virus.

Obama frequently said that the world would change on January 20, 2009, as soon as he was inaugurated as President. His goal was to heal the world with his mere presence -- cure global warming, provide universal health care, close Guantanamo, leave Iraq in peace, bring a two-state solution to Palestinians and Israelis, beat the Taliban in Afghanistan, restore the stock market bubble, and dismantle President Bush's war against terror. Nothing was beyond his reach.

I was actually quite shocked by Obama's speeches after he won the election. Once he had won, he should have pulled back from some of his more quixotic and far-fetched campaign promises. Instead, much to my surprise, he seemed to become even more strident in claiming that the world would change on January 20.

That's when I really began to realize that Obama held a totally fantastical set of beliefs, that weren't just campaign rhetoric. He actually believed them. He really believed that there was no universal health care, that Guantanamo prison was open, that the Palestinians and Israelis could not agree to peace, etc. -- he really believed that these things were true because the Bush administration was simply evil and ideological, that it catered to special interests rather than to the best interests of the country, that all the country's problems really were caused by "the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage."

It's becoming increasingly clear that Obama himself has no strategic world view that goes beyond the reaction to what he calls the "psychodrama of the baby boom generation." He's deeply involved in the "old grudges and revenge plots" that he complained about in the Boomers.

This was apparent in his highly partisan nationally televised September 9 health care speech to Congress. For all that effort, I doubt that it changed a single person's mind. (Polls showed that his approval rating increased slightly after the speech, but the increase quickly dissipated.) If you watched the news in the following days, the only real discussion of the speech were the endless comments on Representative Joe Wilson's outburst "You lie!". The point is that the actual content of the speech was barely mentioned. It was a wasted speech.

A lot of the news this past week has taken place with Obama on the international stage. As usual, he's been a brilliant speaker, but he has nothing to show for it except a series of foreign policy disasters. Let's take a look at the issues:

The Afghanistan war. As I wrote a couple of days ago in "American army general warns of imminent defeat in Afghanistan war," the situation in the Afghan is deteriorating. Obama had expected to be able to direct the American withdrawal from Iraq and then quickly win in Afghanistan, but now he's going to be forced to supply tens of thousands of additional troops to a war effort that can't be won.

Mideast. Obama has frequently criticized President Bush for "ignoring" the Israel/Palestine problem, and letting things get worse. Obama has made Mideast peace a top priority of his administration. He appointed a special envoy, George Mitchell, to meet with both sides, and he's been doing that all year. In August, a number of Obama advisers visited Jerusalem -- George Mitchell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, National Security Advisor James Jones, and White House adviser Dennis Ross. The primary sub-objective was to convince the Israelis to stop building settlements in the West Bank.
On Tuesday, President Obama suffered a major humiliation. He had called a summit meeting of himself, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Obama had wanted the result of this summit to be the announcement that the Israelis would stop building settlements in the West Bank. Instead, Netanyahu refused to make any such agreement, and the only result of the meeting was a photo op and another one of Obama's eloquent speeches.
Actually, President Bush DID try to solve the Mideast problem. In May, 2003, President Bush announced his "Mideast Peace Roadmap" which called for a Palestinian state by 2005, side by side with Israel. It provided a series of steps for both sides to follow, mostly having to do with eliminating violence against both Palestinian and Israeli civilians. The plan was sponsored by the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations.
At that time, I was just really getting started in making Generational Dynamics predictions, and I wrote my first real foreign policy analysis, "Mideast Roadmap - Will it bring peace?" At that time, I said that the Mideast Roadmap could NOT possibly succeed, since both the Israelis and the Palestinians would be re-fighting their genocidal war that followed the partitioning of Palestine in 1948, and the creation of the state of Israel.
It's worth pointing out that there was a great deal of international euphoria over that plan, probably more euphoria than there has been to Obama's efforts.
At that time, it was widely believed that the only obstacle to peace was Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who was described as a terrorist. It was believed that when Arafat was out of the way, then the Palestinian people would happily agree to the two-state solution. So the international community was very excited when Yasser Arafat died in November, 2004.
But the Generational Dynamics analysis was quite different. I wrote the following upon his death:

"Arafat was hardly a high-flying playboy. He lived in a filthy uncomfortable bunker in Ramallah when he could have had a luxury suite in Paris. He was a driven desperate man, obsessed with doing anything, willing to sacrifice his own comfort and livelihood, if it meant finding a way to prevent a new genocidal war between the Arabs and Jews.
Only a "terrorist" who had actually survived the atrocities of the 1940s Arab/Jewish war would be obsessed enough to make these sacrifices, because he considers his own life less important than the lives of his fellow Palestinians, and yes, even the Jews in Israel.
Yes, he was a brutal, vicious terrorist. Yes he was a liar and maybe even a crook. Yes, he approved suicide bombings that killed Jewish children.
But for a man in his position, approving suicide bombings was the lesser of two evils. The greater evil was unleashing a new genocidal war, one that would kill many more Jewish and Arab children than suicide bombings do.
Arafat surely saw what's coming, and that's why he lived his tortured life in his Ramallah bunker."

Since Arafat's death, the Mideast situation has only gotten worse in many ways. In fact, there have been three "small" wars: Israelis vs Hizbollah in Lebanon in 2006, Palestinian Fatah vs Hamas in Gaza in 2008, and Israelis vs Hamas in Gaza in 2009. There's no reduction in tension whatsoever, and it's only a matter of time before one of these small wars triggers a larger war.
And so, generational theory tells us that it doesn't matter how many advisors and envoys Obama sends to the Mideast, or how many summits he calls. No peace agreement will succeed, until after there's been a major genocidal war engulfing the whole region.

Guantánamo prison. When President Obama took office, one of his first acts was to declare that Guantánamo would be closed within a year. He made this announcement without any plan, and with no preparation whatsoever. It's perhaps the ultimate example of his youth, inexperience and naïveté. Since the previous failure to close Guantánamo was caused by Bush's ideology and catering to wealthy special interests, he would simply close it with no problem. As I wrote in "The inane style over substance debate over closing Guantanamo prison," it seemed so easy.
Since then, the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress has refused to fund the closing of Guantanamo. Not a single Congressman, to my knowledge, has agreed to allow prisoners to be transferred to his state's soil. Foreign countries are refusing to accept prisoners, saying that if Americans won't accept them, why should they?
Finally, this past week, the Administration was forced to concede that it will miss the deadline for closing Guantanamo.
As a separate issue, the Obama administration announced it would not seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay. Instead it will hold terrorism suspects indefinitely under existing law, as President Bush had done.

Patriot Act and torture. President Obama repeatedly promised to restore transparency to government, and part of that was to repeal the Patriot Act. Even before the events of last week, there was plenty of Congressional opposition to repealing the Patriot Act.
But in the last week, six men in five states have been charged with a string of terrorist plots to blow up federal buildings, attack Americans, and bring about the sort of mass destruction not seen here since 9/11. Apparently the six were identified through the use of wiretaps authorized by the Patriot Act.
It seems less likely that the Patriot Act will be repealed now.
In a related matter, President Obama has forbidden the use of waterboarding in questioning prisoners, but he's reserved the right to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" besides waterboarding, and there are many such techniques.

Nuclear-free world. President Obama frequently promised to resolve nuclear proliferation problems by engaging Iran and North Korea and, in particular, sitting down with Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In March, he gave a special televised video message to the Iranian people.
In April, President Obama gave a speech in Prague, where he laid out the steps for a nuclear-free world. In that speech, he promised to continue engaging Iran and North Korea to convince them to give up their nuclear weapons. He also reaffirmed President Bush's decision to build a radar tracking station in the Czech Republic, as part of a missile defense system for protection from Iran's missiles.
The whole concept of a "nuclear-free world" is so absurd that anyone who proposes it would have to be declared completely incompetent. China would never agree to such a restriction, since the country is massively increasing its military spending, and preparing for a war with the United States. Pakistan and India would never agree to such a restriction, since they're preparing for war with each other. Iran and North Korea would never agree to such a restriction, since they see nuclear weapons as a source of international respect and prestige.
Several things happened in the last couple of weeks that amount to major setbacks in Obama's vision of a nuclear-free world:
- On Thursday, President Obama announced that he would scrap plans to build the missile shield in Eastern Europe, creating the perception to his opposition that he was caving in to Russian demands.
- On Sunday, Iran began a "show of force" by first two short-range test missiles, just a couple of days after it was revealed that Iran had been secretly building a nuclear facility.
- In a great show of political skill, on Thursday, President Obama became the first American president to chair a meeting of the UN Security Council. It was a special session on global nuclear proliferation. There was a unanimously approved resolution that promised to end nuclear proliferation, but it had no specifics, so it was useless.
As usual, President Obama put on a good show, but there was nothing of substance.

Global warming. Led by Al Gore and his movie An Inconvenient Truth,, the Democrats have always expressed extreme contempt for the Bush Administration's failure to pursue the Kyoto Protocol. (When Gore was Vice President, in 1997 he tried to get the Senate to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, but it was voted down 99 to 1.)
President Obama has vigorously taken up the theme of blaming the Bush Administration for not pursuing the Kyoto protocol, and he repeatedly promised to lead the world to a global deal on climate change by the end of this year.
Like the proposal for a nuclear-free world, the entire climate change effort is absurd. Worse than that, it's a financial scam, where investment banks that defrauded the public with mortgage-backed derivative securities that turned out to be worthless now wish to make money by defrauding the public with derivative securities backed by environmental carbon credits, as I wrote two years ago in "UN Climate Change conference appears to be ending in farce."
On Thursday, President Obama was forced to back down on these promises. China and India are not willing to commit to any reduction in the production of carbon dioxide. In fact, China starts up a new coal-fired power plant every week, and both China and India put thousands of new cars on the road every week.
All of this is happening at a time when President Obama is trying to sell his health care proposal, which I've referred to as "a proposal of economic insanity." He had hoped to be able to give some more speeches, and convince the country to back his proposals, but polls show that the more people hear about the health care proposal, the less they like it.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, there are two important things going on.
First, as I've been saying repeatedly for years on this web site, the attitudes and behaviors of politicians are irrelevant; what's important are the attitudes and behaviors of the great masses of people, entire generations of people. These attitudes and behaviors follow entirely predictable trends that are completely independent of the wishes of the politicians.
That's why President Obama is doing EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS that President Bush would have done, if he had a third term as President. The actions of the President are determined by the people, not vice-versa. As they say in Texas, Obama is "all hat and no cattle."
This also explains why I wrote last year that it made no predictable difference to the country whether Barack Obama or John McCain won the Presidency.
The second point that I want to make is that the "old grudges and revenge plots" that Obama condemned in Boomers are typical of all generational Crisis eras. When President Obama won last year, along with huge majorities in both branches of Congress, most people thought that he would be able to get any law passed that he wanted. That hasn't turned out to be true, because the "old grudges and revenge plots" are just as much a part of the Democratic Party as they are of the Republican Party. It's a generational phenomenon that has nothing to do with political party.
There are many criticisms that get leveled against President Obama, but most of them are wrong-headed. President Obama is not a bad man. He's a decent family man, a role model for families around the country. And he's a patriotic man who loves his country very much, and wants to do what is best and right for his country.
However, Obama is not in control of what's going on in his administration, because he's too young and inexperienced to have formed a coherent world view, or to be able to stand up to the more experienced people advising him and in Congress. So he talks in prepared sound bytes, and he makes purely political and ideological decisions that don't often make sense. The many disasters of the past couple of weeks show that he's going to have to change direction, or risk having a failed presidency.
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the President Barack Obama thread of the Generational Dynamics forum.) (28-Sep-2009) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 28-Sep-2009 After a week of foreign policy disasters, President Obama's entire program is adrift

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 28-Sep-2009
After a week of foreign policy disasters, President Obama's entire program is adrift