UNHOLY ALLIANCE AT WAR WITH OBAMA´S FOREIGN POLICY / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENTARY & ANALYSIS ( RECOMMENDED READING )

Unholy alliance at war with Obama’s foreign policy

By Philip Stephens

Published: January 14 2010 20:31

Dick Cheney and Osama bin Laden are as one. The former US vice-president and the al-Qaeda leader agree that Barack Obama was too soft on the underpants bomber.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged with trying to blow up an airliner on Christmas day, should be in Guantánamo. There, hooded and shackled, he could have been subjected to what Mr Cheney likes to call “enhanced interrogation techniques”; torture in English.

That would have shown that the US is still serious about fighting the “war on terrorism”. Instead, Mr Abdulmutallab was read his legal rights and brought before a US court. Inexplicably, the Nigerian was afforded the same due process as an American would-be terrorist.

Forget the constitution and all that guff about a shining city on the hill; the founding fathers did not have to face Islamist jihadis. No, Mr Obama is soft on terrorism; worse, he is subverting the nation’s security to an over-arching ambition to turn the US into a European-style society.

Mr Cheney’s splenetic outburst after the failed detonation over Detroit still awaits the public endorsement of Mr bin Laden; communications are difficult from the hide on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border to which he escaped from the Bush administration. But we can be sure the al-Qaeda leader shares the view that Mr Abdulmutallab should have received harsher treatment.

Few things have done more to draw recruits to the twisted ideology of violent jihad than images of detainees being tormented by their US captors. The idea that Mr Obama is applying proper standards of justice to terrorists is as abhorrent to al-Qaeda as it seems to be to Mr Cheney. Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and the rest count among Mr bin Laden’s strategic successes. He could scarcely have hoped for a better recruiting sergeant.

Mr Cheney assumes a finite number of terrorists; the more you kill or capture is what matters. In the real world, the fight is about stanching the flow of recruits from the vast pools of disaffected young people in the Islamic world. Anyone who has spent any time in the Middle East knows that the most potent charge levied against the US is that of double standards.

Mr Obama’s crime is to have understood this – to have accepted the advice of intelligence chiefs, military commanders and, dare one say it, diplomats, that defeating al-Qaeda ultimately is about hearts, minds and politics as much as military force. Waterboarding simply does not do it.

Mr Cheney’s outburst, though, is part of a bigger story in Washington. The aim reaches beyond self-exculpation for his lead role in the calamities of George W. Bush’s administration. It represents the sharp tip of a broader assault on Mr Obama’s foreign policy.

The proposition is that the world’s superpower has a binary choice – between aggression and appeasement – in the conduct of foreign policy. It can get its way by beating up enemies and bullying friends; or it can sacrifice the national interest to weak-kneed engagement and soggy multilateralism. Mr Obama has chosen appeasement.

On one level, there is nothing new in the charge. Republicans have accused the Democrats of being weak on defence ever since the end of the second world war, even if the attacks have rarely been infused with as much partisan vitriol. Soft on terrorism has become a substitute for soft on communism.

For all that, one might have thought that the events of the past few years would have given even the most partisan ideologues on the right pause for thought. The war in Iraq did more than any military adventure since the Vietnam war to drain American power and prestige. It was Mr Cheney and his chums who allowed the Taliban to return to Afghanistan and Mr bin Laden to escape. How did any of this make America safer?

The critics have moved on. The underlying charge now is that Mr Obama has decided that the US should accommodate the big shifts in global power that presage a relative weakening – relative is a vital qualification – in US primacy. Simply put, the president stands accused of standing idly by while other nations rise. America should be blocking the advance of future adversaries rather than inviting them to join a new global order.

Beguiling though the thought might be that history can be stopped in its tracks to preserve the west’s global hegemony for another couple of centuries, there is no accompanying explanation of how precisely Mr Obama can turn back the geopolitical tides.

How does he keep China down and Brazil in its place? Should the US be bombing Beijing as well as Tehran and Pyongyang? Should it be bankrolling coups in Latin America? Or should Mr Obama engage with the facts as they are rather than as his opponents would like them to be.

This is not to say that the president should underestimate US power in any of its dimensions. Nor is it to rule out the use of military force. Realism militates instead against the dangerous gesture politics that pretends that there is an easy alternative to talking to Iran, or co-existing with a rising China.

Mr Obama’s foreign policy has not been an unalloyed success. There have been mis-steps – notably in his hesitant efforts to restart a Middle East peace process. Occasionally, as during his visit to China, he has not found the right balance between necessary co-operation and robust defence of US values and interests. He needs to show toughness – sometimes in conversations with allies such as Israel as well as with autocrats in Moscow and Beijing.

There are also obvious political pressures – even among supporters there is an impatience for foreign policy “wins” that belies the world’s complexity. The nervousness in the White House about closing Guantánamo is palpable.

Mr Obama must push back. Those who claim that diplomacy has “failed” should be invited to offer credible alternatives. Those who want Mr Obama to “get tough” with Iran should be asked to explain how this will help the reform movement that now offers the best chance of overturning the present regime.

Force, or the threat of it, is not an answer to every challenge. Treating with the world as it is – recognising the reach and limits of US power and deploying persuasion as well as, sometimes, coercion – is a sound starting point for US foreign policy. Unless, of course, your name is Cheney or bin Laden.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.