Speak Softly and Carry a Small Stick

Today, we are seeing the preeminent power of the United States deteriorate and disappear in wide swaths of the world. We are observing President Obama walk away and shrink from responsibility for effective foreign relations in Eastern Europe, Egypt, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Russia, and Iran. Now, he is refusing to take a public stand in favor of the European Union supporters in Ukraine. He is taking this weak-kneed stand by effectively dismantling our military establishment, as documented by John Lehman in the Wall Street Journal editorial, More Bureaucrats, Fewer Jets and Ships of 12/10/13. During the Reagan years, our navy had 600 ships afloat—today, there are 280. The Air Force has fewer than half the number of fighters and bombers it had 30 years ago. Air Force fighter planes today are, on average, 28 years old. Instead of the 20-division army supported by the United States during President Reagan’s administration, we have only 10 now.

Our President thinks he can control worldwide terrorism and naked aggression against our Middle Eastern allies with diplomacy. He is ignoring the classic aphorism that diplomatic power is the shadow cast by military power.

President Reagan’s legacy for the time he was in office included his facing down the Soviet Union and breaking apart the Berlin wall. He demonstrated that a race for military power need not result in a destructive use of that power. The Soviets backed down because they feared the obvious catastrophe that would consume them if they tried to challenge the United States. Thus, diplomacy backed by the Big Stick mentioned first by President Theodore Roosevelt, was the driving power in saving the world from a conflagration of violence and disorder perpetrated by a rogue nation bent on conquest.

When Jimmy Carter was President, he watched and tried diplomacy to get Libya to quit bombing passenger planes over the Mediterranean. He got no place with that policy. Soon, Ronald Reagan succeeded him in office. One of the first things that Reagan did was to send fighter/bombers over Libya and drop a bomb on a munitions plant in Libya. The trouble with hijacked planes over the Mediterranean quit immediately. Diplomacy without military back-up is a waste of time.

The world has seen timidity like that of President Obama demonstrated before. Prior to World War II, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, tried to placate and appease the Nazi’s at Munich in 1938. The result was disaster, as Germany marched directly into Czechoslovakia and Poland and subsequently attacked the low countries, Russia, France, and Great Britain, herself. Appeasement does not work with tyrants.

Clement Atlee succeeded Winston Churchill as Britain’s Prime Minister in July 1945 and proceeded to dismantle the strategic and imperial inheritance of world power ceded to him by his successor. Under Atlee’s guidance, the British Empire divested itself of its hegemony over its colonies in India, Burma, and Ceylon; and he reduced the British presence in Egypt, Iran, Turkey Greece, and Southeast Asia. British bases in the Mediterranean and the East Indies were considered obsolete; and they were decommissioned. Atlee’s legacy was a weakened British presence in the world. Britain has never regained her former influence and power in the world.

President Obama seems extremely interested in leaving a good and lasting legacy to America when he is out of power. His legacy seems to be a markedly weakened United States abroad (and a confused health care system at home).