Legal Commentary

If foreign citizens would cheer, swoon, and sing "Kumbaya" along with Pres. Obama, does that make him a fit commander-in-chief and head of state?

By Beldar

WaPo's David Ignatius opines today that Barack Obama is just so damned cool that the rest of the world outside America ? allies and enemies alike ? will join in the swoon for him that has caught up so many of Obama's American supporters. Thus, Ignatius argues, America will actually be better off having a president whose military, foreign policy, and national security experience can't fill half a matchbook cover:

To prepare for the next stage of the U.S. presidential campaign, try this thought experiment: Imagine the television footage of Barack Obama's first trip abroad as president ? the crowds in the streets of Moscow, Cairo, Nairobi, Shanghai, Paris, Islamabad. Now try to imagine the first visit by President John McCain to those same cities. McCain is a great man, and he would be welcomed with respect, deference, perhaps a bit of fear.

Obama would generate different and more intense reactions ? surprise and uncertainty, to be sure, but also idealism and hope. Now tell me which image would foster a stronger and safer America in the 21st century.

Obama has liabilities as a candidate, but his inexperience paradoxically may actually bolster one of his core arguments ? that he would give America a fresh start.

This isn't just drinking the Kool-Aid. This is slitting your wrists and replacing all of your bodily fluids with the Kool-Aid. Images are important. But image alone can't "foster," much less accomplish, a stronger and safer America, and only a fool could pretend otherwise.

Comparisons between John F. Kennedy and Barack H. Obama are most vivid and valid with respect to their shared (a) charisma and (b) foreign policy inexperience. Kennedy, at least, was a war veteran, and he came from a Democratic Party that hadn't yet started reflexively doubting, then hating and apologizing for, all things American.

And it's true that when Kennedy traveled abroad, his youth and enthusiasm and charisma ? his and his even younger wife's good looks, glamor, and sex appeal, and even (as silly as it now seems to us) his hatlessness ? generated tons of adoration from the foreign masses. I don't mean to wholly dismiss the important role that an American president can and should fulfill in articulating and personifying our country's characteristic national values (e.g., liberty, self-reliance and -autonomy, democracy, the rule of law, justice) and personal values (e.g., confidence, optimism, piety, generosity, compassion, curiosity, steadfastness, loyalty, integrity). JFK did indeed hit all those notes abroad, as he generally had done at home too (if you ignore, as the press conspired to do, his reckless, uncontrollable, and serial marital infidelities).

The problem is that JFK's shiny image and soaring rhetoric became net disadvantages in America's non-superficial dealings with the world. At the geopolitical, governmental level, based on his youth and his lack of demonstrated experience, he was initially assessed by both our friends and our foes as a lightweight, a dilettante, and a weak-willed pretender. And he immediately proceeded to give the world proof of that initial assessment: From the Bay of Pigs, through a disastrous Vienna summit with Khrushchev, through his now-hot now-cold support for the Diem government in South Vietnam, right up to ? most dangerously ? the "Missiles of October," John F. Kennedy's foreign policy inexperience and inconsistencies brought us literally to the brink of thermo-nuclear war.

(When I made this same point in a post a few weeks ago, a commenter said, in effect, "So you would rather JFK have buckled under to the Soviets and allowed them to keep their nuclear missiles in Cuba?" Well, duh. Of course not. My point was, and is, that we should never have been faced with the threats resulting from the showdown in October 1962 because if we had had a capable and credible American commander-in-chief and head of state, the Soviets would never have dared place missiles there to begin with. Like JFK's getting his PT boat run over by a Japanese destroyer before he heroically rescued his crew, the Missiles of October episode was a profile in courage wholly predicated on a profile in incompetency.)

   

JFK's predecessor's foreign policy experience and gravitas, of course, was a given. Dwight Eisenhower had already defeated Hitler and saved the world, after all (and yes, that's something of an exaggeration, but thus was he perceived, and not without some considerable basis). But it's only now, decades later, that we're beginning to properly appreciate how much Ike's foreign policy genius as president was largely hidden to us (if not to world leaders) behind that sunny, bland smile and those calm rounds of golf. Ike was so good, he made it all look easy, even though it never was; and there was no danger that America's enemies would ever underestimate him. Jack Kennedy was so bad, he made it look nearly impossible, even while women fainted and crowds around the world chanted his name; and his election was the international signal for all would-be adventurers, tyrants, and revolutionaries to get wild and go crazy.

Objectively, the only worse-prepared and worse-performing American president than JFK on foreign affairs in the second half of the 20th Century was Jimmy Carter ? whose pre-White House foreign policy and national security credentials also resemble (in their shallowness) Barack Obama's. From our enemies' point of view, Carter's election was JFK redux. And of course, the main enemy adventurisms enabled by Carter's perceived and actual spinelessness were (a) the Iranian revolution and seizure of the American embassy hostages and (b) the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 ? with meandering and unhappy consequences from both of those events continuing to play out even today.

   

Oh, I have no doubt that a President Obama would draw rock-star adulation from crowds in Moscow, Cairo, Nairobi, Shanghai, Paris, and Islamabad. But especially in a time of war, America can't afford a political rock-star instead of a statesman as commander-in-chief and head of state. To pretend ? as Ignatius' op-ed does ? that a political rock-star would actually make a superior commander-in-chief and head of state precisely because he's a political rock star with no relevant experience is an amazing, and amazingly dangerous, self-delusion. By contrast, Ignatius' admission that a President McCain would be "welcomed with respect, deference, perhaps a bit of fear" in all those foreign cities is actually one of the strongest and least disputable arguments for the McCain 2008 campaign that I've yet heard.

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on February 24, 2008 (boomark / email).