America is in danger of being the first great power to be laughed off the world stage
by mark steyn
For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.
by mark steyn
For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.
It pains me to
have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a
KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of
liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house
writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law,
was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no
longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling
coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He
warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out
that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international
community everyone is exceptional in his own way.
All this the
average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional.
Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing
himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core
platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” In the biographical
tag at the end, the Times editors informed us: “Vladimir V.
Putin is the president of Russia.” But by this stage, one would not have been
surprised to see: “Vladimir V. Putin is the author of the new memoir The
Audacity of Vlad, which he will be launching at a campaign breakfast in
Ames, Iowa, this weekend.”
As Iowahawk
ingeniously summed it up, Putin is “now just basically doing donuts in Obama’s
front yard.” It’s not just that he can stitch him up at the G-8, G-20,
Gee-don’t-tell-me-you’re-coming-back-for-more, and turn the leader of the free
world into the planet’s designated decline-and-fall-guy, but he can slough off
crappy third-rate telepromptered mush better than you community-organizer
schmucks, too. Let’s take it as read that Putin didn’t write this himself any
more than Obama wrote that bilge he was drowning in on Tuesday night, when he
took to the airwaves to argue in favor of the fierce urgency of doing something
about gassed Syrian moppets but not just yet. Both guys are using writers, but
Putin’s are way better than Obama’s — and English isn’t even their first
language. With this op-ed Tsar Vlad is telling Obama: The world knows you
haven’t a clue how to play the Great Game or even what it is, but the only
parochial solipsistic dweeby game you do know how to play I can kick your butt
all over town on, too.
This is what
happens when you elect someone because he looks cool standing next to Jay-Z.
Putin is cool mainly in the sense that Yakutsk in February is. In American
pop-culture terms, he is a faintly ridiculous figure, with his penchant for
homoerotic shirtlessness, his nipples entering the room like an advance
security team; the celebrities he attracts are like some rerun channel way up
the end of the dial: Goldie Hawn was in the crowd when Putin, for no apparent
reason, sang “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” which Goldie seemed to
enjoy. In reality, Putin finds his thrill by grabbing Obama’s blueberries and
squeezing hard. Cold beats cool.
Charles Crawford,
Britain’s former ambassador in Serbia and Poland, called last Monday “the worst
day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began.” Obama set it in
motion at a press conference last year by drawing his famous “red line.”
Unlike, say, the undignified scrums around the Canadian and Australian prime ministers,
Obama doesn’t interact enough with the press for it to become normal or real.
So at this rare press conference he was, as usual, playing a leader who’s
giving a press conference. The “red line” line sounds like the sort of thing a
guy playing a president in a movie would say — maybe Harrison Ford in Air
Force One or Michael Douglas in The American President. It
never occurred to him that out there in the world beyond the Republic of Cool
he’d set an actual red line and some dime-store dictator would cross it with
impunity. So, for most of the last month, the bipartisan foreign-policy
establishment has assured us that, regardless of whether it will accomplish
anything, we now have to fire missiles at a sovereign nation because “America’s
credibility is at stake.”
This is diplomacy
for post-moderns: The more you tell the world that you have to bomb Syria to
preserve your credibility, the less credible any bombing raid on Syria is going
to be — especially when your leaders are reduced to negotiating the precise
degree of military ineffectiveness necessary to maintain that credibility. In
London this week, John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, capped his own
impressive four-decade accumulation of magnificently tin-eared sound bites by
assuring his audience that the military devastation the superpower would wreak
on Assad would be “unbelievably small.” Actually, the problem is that it will
be all too believably small. The late Milton Berle, when challenged on his
rumored spectacular endowment, was wont to respond that he would only take out
just enough to win. In London, Kerry took out just enough to lose.
In the Obama era, to modify Teddy Roosevelt, America chatters unceasingly and carries an unbelievably small stick. In this, the wily Putin saw an opening, and offered a “plan” so absurd that even Obama’s court eunuchs in the media had difficulty swallowing it. A month ago, Assad was a reviled war criminal and Putin his arms dealer. Now, Putin is the honest broker and Obama’s partner for peace, and the war criminal is at the negotiating table with his chances of survival better than they’ve looked in a year. On the same day the U.S. announced it would supply the Syrian rebels with light arms and advanced medical kits, Russia announced it would give Assad’s buddies in Iran the S-300 ground-to-air weapons system and another nuclear reactor.
Putin has pulled
off something incredible: He’s gotten Washington to anoint him as the
international community’s official peacemaker, even as he assists Iran in going
nuclear and keeping their blood-soaked Syrian client in his presidential
palace. Already, under the “peace process,” Putin and Assad are running rings
around the dull-witted Kerry, whose Botoxicated visage embodies all too well
the expensively embalmed state of the superpower.
As for Putin’s
American-exceptionalism crack, he was attacking less the concept than Obama’s
opportunist invocation of it as justification for military action in Syria.
Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans alike took the bait. Eager to mend
bridges with the base after his amnesty bill, Mario Rubio insisted atNational
Review Online that America was still, like, totally exceptional.
Sorry, this
doesn’t pass muster even as leaden, staffer-written codswallop. It’s not the
time — not when you’re a global joke, not when every American ally is cringing
with embarrassment at the amateurishness of the last month. Nobody, friend or
foe, wants to hear about American exceptionalism when the issue is American
ineffectualism. On CBS, Bashar Assad called the U.S. government “a social-media
administration.” He’s got a better writer than Obama, too. America is in danger
of being the first great power to be laughed off the world stage. When the
president’s an irrelevant narcissist and his secretary of state’s a
vainglorious buffoon, Marco Rubio shouldn’t be telling the world don’t worry,
the other party’s a joke, too.
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