Washington is reeling from the latest WikiLeaks document
dump. The foreign policy wonks insist that there are few, if
any, major surprises. "Much of what we've seen thus far,"
opined Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign
Relations, "confirms more than it informs." And, in the end,
what these documents confirm is that
President
Obama's foreign policy is a mess.
Even if you're supportive of Obama's foreign policy efforts,
the WikiLeaks dump is a bigger deal than the know-it-alls are
suggesting. It's one thing to believe something as a
generality; it's another to dispel plausible deniability for
all concerned.
Everyone may know that the Saudis are worried about the
Iranian bomb. But knowing that isn't quite the same as
learning that the Saudi monarchy has implored the U.S. to
attack
Iran
and "cut off the head of the snake," in the words of a Saudi
envoy. Egypt and other Arab states have called the Iranian
program an "existential threat" and have begged the U.S. to
use military force to stop it (of course, if the U.S. did take
out the program, these same regimes, not to mention countless
domestic critics of
Israel,
would insist that the U.S. was doing the bidding of the Israel
lobby).
Around the globe, diplomats, dignitaries and potentates feel
betrayed and exposed. Certainly, the news that
Secretary
of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered American
diplomats at the
United
Nations to spy on other delegations will make lunchtime
at the
Turtle
Bay commissary a bit awkward.
Politically, the one advantage for the
White
House is the sheer volume of the leaks. If these stories
came out one by one, there'd be room for them to flare up as
full-fledged controversies, but with a quarter of a million
documents, each story robs oxygen from the next.
Still, the (relative) lack of surprises is hardly an
exoneration for anybody — not for WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange, who has declared himself an enemy of the United
States, nor for the Obama administration, which seems utterly
lost about how to deal with him.
The administration's formal response to the revelations was to
have
State
Department attorney Harold Koh pen a tersely worded
cease-and-desist letter to Assange, asking him to pretty
please stop publishing thousands of state secrets. With the
important and complicated exception of Afghanistan, such
high-minded legalism is par for the course.
Ever since his bizarre campaign stop in
Berlin
and his primary debate promise to meet with Iranian
President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "without preconditions," Obama has
consistently stressed his preference for soft diplomacy and
gauzy platitudes about international cooperation. For
instance, the
fall
of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany
proved, according to then-candidate Obama, that "there is no
challenge too great for a world that stands as one" — an
incomprehensible claim that would earn an F from any high
school history teacher.
Since then, on issue after issue, Obama's rhetorical
globaloney has met the grinder. Perversely, his best moment
was when he accepted the
Nobel
Peace Prize and felt compelled to explain why he didn't
deserve it — yet — and give a legitimately stirring defense of
military action.
It is certainly true that Obama inherited many of his foreign
policy challenges. Iran was pursuing nukes back when he was in
the Illinois state Senate, and North Korea has been crazy
since before he was born. But Obama insisted that his would be
the better way. Engagement, dialogue,
kumbaya would
all win the day.
And yet they keep losing. A month after his inauguration, the
North Koreans tested a ballistic missile. Since then, they've
revealed yet another nuclear program and attacked South Korea
just weeks after Obama's embarrassing failure to win a trade
deal from Seoul during an official visit. Meanwhile, according
to WikiLeaks and other sources, the North Koreans have been
selling ballistic missiles to the Iranians.
The irony is that Assange represents a purer form of Obama's
own idealism. According to Assange's dangerous utopianism, in
governance purity must define means, not just ends. He is
convinced that he has revealed the hypocrisy and corruption of
U.S. foreign policy, when in reality all he has revealed is
that pursuing foreign policy ideals is messier and more
complicated in a world where bad people pursue bad ends. We
can hope that Obama has been learning that lesson. Assange,
meanwhile, is simply blind to it.
