FOR once, Joe Biden wasn’t making a gaffe when he warned that, if elected president, Barack Obama would quickly be put to the test by America’s many enemies.
Biden didn’t say why this is bound to happen, but the answer is clear: Obama would be put to the test because he is untested.
More important, perhaps, as a candidate, Obama has worked hard to remain untestable by offering ambiguous, contradictory and confusing views on key issues of US policy:
* On Iraq, he has promised both “full and total withdrawal” and an open-ended US military commitment to pursue vaguely defined missions.
Plus, last summer, he tried to persuade the Iraqis to delay a security accord with the United States, hinting that he would offer better terms. This has played into the hands of Iran, which is also pressuring Iraqi politicians (and bribing some) to delay the accord in the belief that Obama will be easier to push around than President Bush.
* On Russia’s attempts at returning as an imperial power, challenging the US position in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, Obama has implied a moral equivalence between Moscow and the victims of its aggression. He has also sent wrong signals to Ukrainians by using the Russian name of their country, even as the two neighbors head for a confrontation over the Sevastopol naval base.
* On the Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama has promised “strong support” for the Jewish state but refuses to designate its most violent enemies as terrorists. Instead, he prefers such diplomatic terms as “extremists” or “violent armed groups.”
* On Afghanistan – which he calls “the right war,” as opposed to “the wrong war” in Iraq – he supports the recent decision by the US to deploy more troops but refuses to define any precise objectives.
* On the global War on Terror, Obama (with Biden) doesn’t believe the word “war” is appropriate. He sees terrorism as a matter of law enforcement and promises to bring “the perpetrators to justice.”
* On Iran, he has all but accepted the mullahs’ nuclear program while declaring it unacceptable. By suggesting unconditional talks, Obama has tossed three UN mandatory resolutions on the junk pile, removing pressure on Tehran to abandon its ambitions.
* On Europe – where, in one of those ironies of history, a majority of governments are pro-American for the first time in a decade – Obama has spoken of ending Washington’s supposed “unilateralism.” Yet, at the same time, he’s asking them to change their policies – in the case of Germany even to amend its constitution – to be more helpful in Afghanistan among other places.
Obama’s critics have tried to explain these foreign-policy ambiguities by citing his inexperience or noting that he is obliged to court constituencies with conflicting interests.
Both reasons are valid – but only up to a point.
Obama’s interest in international affairs looks to be quite recent. As a community organizer and then a Chicago politician until 2005, he was more interested in building a power base than in forming a broad view of America’s place in a dangerous world.
And the campaign has obliged him to please or neutralize conflicting elements of his party. For example, the MoveOn types who provided his initial base would settle for nothing short of an open and full admission of defeat in Iraq – yet Democrats of a more “realist” stripe wouldn’t be comfortable with a leader who tried to transform victory into defeat for purely partisan reasons.
In his early years, Obama was influenced by radicals – Franz Fanon, Edward Said and Louis Farrakhan, among others – who saw the US as an imperialist power and Israel as its bridgehead in the Middle East. But now, as a presidential candidate, he knows that the self-loathing discourse of homegrown anti-Americanism repels more voters than it attracts.
All that said, the main reason for Obama’s contradictions and confusion may be his own uncertainties. He has tried to be everything to everybody, a Pirandellian character in search of multiple authors. No one knows who he is.
Biden is right to warn that a President Obama would be tested – just as Jimmy Carter was tested and found wanting almost 30 years ago.
Carter’s inexperience and perceived weakness emboldened America’s enemies and led to the seizure of power by the mullahs in Tehran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet domination of much of Africa and the first oil shock – which triggered double-digit inflation and mass unemployment in Western democracies.
Raymond Barre, a former prime minister of France, has said that the Carter presidency produced a decade of misery for the West – and might have led to complete Soviet victory, had there not been a change at the White House in 1980.
Bill Clinton was also tested with (for example) the first attack on the World Trade Center – to which he reacted by firing missiles at a donkey shed in Afghanistan (after making sure no terrorists were hiding there). That response encouraged the terrorists and produced the massacre of US troops in Somalia, the bombing of US embassies in Africa and the Khobar Towers base in Saudi Arabia – and, in 2001, the 9/11 tragedy.
Amir Taheri’s latest book, “The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution,” is due out next month.