The end of summer 2013 marked the official end of the U.S. superpower status. Were Osama bin Laden alive today, he would probably not bother to attack the U.S.
Yesterday’s ACD blog proved to be prescient. As anticipated, Obama, the stillborn Nobel Peace Laureate, has found yet another excuse not to keep Assad from exterminating his own unruly subjects. While some Americans may be deceived into believing that their president’s hands are tied because he needs Congress’s approval to act, the Syrian official newspaper Al-Thawra rightly pointed out that “Obama announced … directly … the beginning of the historic American retreat.”
Yesterday, the president declared that he, Obama, really wants to go and fight the Syrian bully. But the 44th president, who issued 162 executive orders since taking office in 2009, is waiting for Congressional approval to stop Assad, thus condoning the Syrian regime’s atrocities.
Secretary of State John Kerry was trotted out today to say to CNN that military action against Syria is not something that needs to happen as soon as possible, “like previous situations.” Indeed, Assad has been killing his countrymen for more than two years, sometimes even with gas, as the U.S. claimed last April. So why do something now, as opposed to tomorrow, next week, next month or whenever?
Kerry thoughtfully explained: “Since it is not an emergency overnight, as we saw in a place like Libya, where people were about to be slaughtered. Since we have the right to strike at any time if Assad is foolish enough to engage in yet another attack, we believe that it is important before this takes place to have the full investment of the American people and of the Congress.”
And so, yesterday another nail was driven into the coffin of America the superpower. However, as Sol Sanders shows below, the lid on that coffin may have to be pried back off in the event of what seems to be the inevitable blow up of the Middle East and war with Iran that the Syrian situation portends. Can Obama drive enough nails to make that impossible between now and 2016?
The Balts, for example, are discussing a unified energy market with Poland to break the Gasprom hold with U.S. liquefied natural gas imports. It was discussed on the sidelines of Obama’s meeting with the three Baltic presidents in the middle of the Syria crisis, overshadowed by one of Obama’s several crisis statements. That meeting, by the way, was scheduled months ago on the eve of what was originally the President’s one-on-one with Putin following the G20 in Petrograd, where he had earlier promised to be “more flexible” in a second term in reaching an understanding with Putin. Another one of the many anomalies of the Obama foreign policy?
Nor have the Persian Gulf states escaped the growing rearrangement in world energy markets. The days of vulgar surpluses–which have permitted the Emirates and the Saudis to bail out Egypt’s new military government which overthrew Morsi’s Brotherhood–is coming to an end. (That includes Qatar’s $35-billion dalliance with the al Jazeera network and financing the Egyptian Brotherhood and al Nusra, the al Qaeda affiliate, in the Syrian struggle.)
Reports of Saudi efforts to reach Putin in an effort to stabilize notoriously fickle world oil markets are probably wishful thinking, even though there is a theoretical logic to any such pipedream. The Saudi (and the Shah’s!) OPEC efforts to establish a producer’s oligopoly has already disappeared in the mists of history. With this background, nobody will be as disappointed with Obama’s postponement and perhaps end to a strike against Assad as the Gulf Arabs. The Saudis and the Bahrainis live with significant and threatening Shia populations whom Iran’s mullahs have tried to stir into rebellion. They also have to wonder if Obama’s reluctance to take on U.S. public opinion for an immediate strike against Assad is not a part of a general American retreat from the region (first in Iraq, then in Afghanistan), leaving them to face the Iranians who may soon have nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, there is a tacit alliance, now, of most of the sheikhdoms with the Israelis in support of the new Cairo military regime with its fierce antagonism to the religious fanaticism (and incompetence) of the former Brotherhood government. It is as much a part of current scene as the Saudis’ efforts, however feeble, to topple Iran’s ally in Damascus by supporting “moderate” Islamists.
Although Britain gave up her tutorials to the Gulf Arabs in the mid-60s, the Arabs as well as the Europeans have looked to London’s “special relationship” with Washington to weld temporary alliances and keep the Mideast peace. True, Prime Minister David Cameron’s forthright approach to the House of Commons for an endorsement of his policies fell by a small majority. And his failure was in part Opposition Leader Edward Milbank’s treachery. But it dramatizes the increasing lack of resources for the United Kingdom to punch above its weight in its joint military efforts with Washington.
Furthermore, Cameron’s failure in Commons played a big role in Obama’s decision to ask for a Congressional endorsement before any military action in Syria. And, while the fiasco of the Euro guarantees the debate over “the special relationship” vs. further integration into the European Union will not be resurrected, London is now likely to turn to the other 10 members of the EU who do not use the Euro as a counter to German and French calls for more fiscal and political integration of the European Union.
Facing a national election, there was never any question of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel joining the U.S. in any military action in Syria. And, in fact, after the fiascos of Iraq and to some extent, Afghanistan, the whole question of NATO’s becoming the world’s “enforcer,” occasionally at the request of the UN but more often for the West, has probably had its day. It was only the drama and the stunning brutality of the attack on the U.S. on 9/11 that finally decided the long debate over “out of theater” operations for NATO and led it into Afghanistan. By post-Soviet standards, there was wide participation, if sometimes, as with the Germans, so many restrictions were placed on their participation that the great brunt of the fighting still had to be by the Americans, the British, and the Australians. Therefore, the vote in the House of Commons may well have decided the future not only of “the special relationship” but of NATO itself. Ironically, Paris’s offer to be among the willing in Obama’s skinny new coalition notwithstanding has more to do with a failed domestic French administration than military strategy. One of the elements in the equation, if somewhat camouflaged, is the growing issue of Muslim immigrants and their progeny in the European countries and their increasing demographic weight among the young. (London’s upcoming mayoralty election will hang on it, for example.) Any crisis in the Arab-Muslim world henceforth will have to take that into consideration domestically.
Over all these political considerations, of course, hangs the threat of violence breaking out in the region that might endanger the flow of oil and gas. One of the considerations, apparently, in Cairo’s current blockade and pressure on Hamas (at a time Gaza’s northern portals are open to Israel!) is the growing connections between Gaza Islamists and the chaotic situation in the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian military has made security of the Suez Canal its highest priority and is working with the aid of Israeli drones to reassert its control over neighboring Sinai. With the disappearance of tourism because of the violence, the Canal’s revenues become a chief strategic consideration not only for the Egyptian military but as important to a straitened U.S. Navy maneuvering around the several Mideast crises areas from the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. But as far away as it is from the Gulf oilfields, the choke points at Suez and at the Hormuz Strait–and as little as it has had to do with transporting oil and gas–the discussion an American strike on Syria has had impact on the markets. A contentious debate in the Congress is not likely to improve investors’ confidence.
Unanticipated events and consequences arising from Obama’s erratic decision-making process will be rolling in during the next few weeks. But what is already as clear as those cool winter nights coming in Jerusalem is that the 2013 Syrian crisis is just beginning.
A version of this column is scheduled for publication Monday, September 2, 2013, at worldtribune.com