Reaching Out To Friends

Tory Diary questions what the leftist New Statesman has asserted:

Did Obama really brand David Cameron “a lightweight”?

One can’t know of course, since there is no recording.  But if true, it demonstrates at least three things:

1. That he can be far more condescending than George W Bush, who was accused, let us recall, of being precisely that (when speaking a bit too casually, as has been his wont) with Tony “Yo” Blair.  And, as it also relatedly demonstrates, the President-elect is apt to be nasty behind another’s back when ears might overhear.  Hardly diplomatic that.
2. It hardly demonstrates also a “foreign affairs” outreach that is supposedly dramatically “morally” superior to the approach employed by his “arrogant” predecessor.
3. It would make this President-elect, who faced charges all during the presidential campaign about his own “lightweightedness,” even more arrogant than one might think possible, in dismissing any other party leader in a major democracy as “a lightweight.”

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That’s just part of it.  The New Statesman’s James Macintyre’s piece revolves around how the President-elect is far better aware than is Mr Cameron how the European Union is “the future” and Britain is “the past.”  Amusingly, in explaining how, Mr Macintyre produces a litany of breezy half-truths and obfuscations:

…A widely read, broad-minded internationalist, Obama has long valued Europe and, asked during the primaries against Hillary Clinton to name the crucial US allies, he instantly placed “the European Union” at the top of the list. Perhaps more importantly, on defining international issues such as the invasion of Iraq (unlike Clinton and certainly unlike Cameron), Obama’s position was closer to that of mainstream Europe – which, as led by President Jacques Chirac of France, tended to be more “doveish” than “hawkish”…

The “widely read” then candidate Sen Obama, let us also not forget, did not know Auschwitz was in Poland.  That said, if he does feel that way, the now President-elect also appears not to grasp that “the European Union” is not a nation-state.  (At least, not yet.) We will return to that below, as well as to the New Statesman’s endorsement of a Chirac-ite EU foreign policy.  But first:

…although Obama has dismayed many supporters and threatened his own image as a progressive change-maker by appointing the previously pro-war Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, most of his team do not like what they know of British Conservatism. Susan Rice, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, entered politics partly in horror at Tory refusal to intervene in the Balkans or in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Why on earth would American Susan Rice have “entered politics” in the U.S. “partly” in “horror” at British Tory foreign policy?  Mr Macintyre doesn’t see fit to say.

Assuming she was just that British-focused, far more important would appear to be this: Despite Mr Macintyre’s base assertion that President Obama’s foreign policy view will be more akin to that of France’s former president, Jacques Chirac, no mention is made regarding her stance on the EU’s — meaning especially Jacques Chirac’s France’s — refusal to involve itself in Rwanda to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

In fact, Rwanda has recently charged that Jacques Chirac’s “more doveish” France was actually complicit in the genocide. True, perhaps the EU has moved on.  Still, given the organization’s ditherings over what to do over the Congo now, in 2008-2009, as we can see matters substantially have little changed in 15 years.  But, then again, Mr Macintyre has nothing to say about that either.

Joe Biden, the incoming vice-president, has said that when he examined the Tory policy of appeasing Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s he could hear “the tap, tap, tap of Chamberlain’s umbrella at Munich”.

The attempt to make the now Vice President-elect look like (interestingly, Tory) Churchill is nothing short of laughable. On the serious side, again, one might ask: did Britain act “alone” in pre-NATO intervention Bosnia? Again, as with Rwanda, the EU’s overarching policy shortcomings (some might call them disasters) goes unmentioned.

In the Balkans, Britain, under a Conservative prime minister, worked largely within the framework outlined by the wider (France and Germany dominated) EU — which is precisely now what the New Statesman demands it always adhere to — and so found itself endorsing a policy that would, if unaltered, have led eventually to the destruction of the Bosnian state and a humanitarian crisis likely far wider than the conflict itself.  Again, no mention of that fact.

The EU’s “actions” (if that is the right word) there in the early 1990s are well-known to have been at best ham-fisted and hardly the bloc’s, one might say, “finest hour.”  The U.S. (to their credit, including both Democrats and Republicans) had asserted at the time that the UN arms embargo (if we are talking “internationalism,” you cannot omit the UN) only prevented the Bosnians from arming themselves.  And the UN “peacekeeping” presence — do we seem to recall UN “peacekeepers,” including British, being used as human shields? — arguably made matters worse.

More curious is how it was Tony Blair, with Conservative support, both fearing another Bosnia, who chided Bill Clinton into leading NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo.  Where was the EU then?  And where was the UN?  Of that, once more, Mr Macintyre has nothing to say.

Obama’s incoming national security adviser, James Jones, led Nato and was the EU’s favourite American general. At a time when the new team at the White House wants to build bridges with Europe, Cameron’s fervent hostility to the EU will cause dismay.

As for James Jones as the EU’s “favourite American general?” What that might mean, as well as what it is meant to imply, is anyone’s guess. But based on EU military past practice in, for instance, the Balkans, that is actually rather more worrying than reassuring.  Let’s remember, courtesy of InfoPlease:

…In Dec. 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia and asked for recognition by the European Union (EU). In a March 1992 referendum, Bosnian voters chose independence, and President Izetbegovic declared the nation an independent state. Unlike the other former Yugoslav states, which were generally composed of a dominant ethnic group, Bosnia was an ethnic tangle of Muslims (44%), Serbs (31%), and Croats (17%), and this mix contributed to the duration and savagery of its fight for independence.

Both the Croatian and Serbian presidents had planned to partition Bosnia between themselves. Attempting to carve out their own enclaves, the Serbian minority, with the help of the Serbian Yugoslav army, took the offensive and laid siege, particularly on Sarajevo, and began its ruthless campaigns of ethnic cleansing, which involved the expulsion or massacre of Muslims. Croats also began carving out their own communities. By the end of Aug. 1992, rebel Bosnian Serbs had conquered over 60% of Bosnia. The war did not begin to wane until NATO stepped in, bombing Serb positions in Bosnia in Aug. and Sept. 1995. Serbs entered the UN safe havens of Tuzla, Zepa, and Srebrenica, where they murdered thousands. About 250,000 died in the war between 1992 and 1995…

So the EU ended the war?  Apparently 250,000 deaths ultimately requiring U.S.-led NATO intervention is to be considered the rock upon which the Obama European foreign policy will be built?  One shudders.  But Mr Macintyre, and “a senior Labour source” evidently do not:

As a senior Labour source said: “Obama will want to work with a united Europe, not the 27 divided nations envisaged by a David Cameron, William Hague and [the Eurosceptic backbencher] Bill Cash vision of Europe. Tory isolationism is the last thing Obama’s new foreign policy team will want from London.”…

That “senior Labour source” (and incidentally, why hasn’t he been arrested?) appears to think that there is a “united Europe?”  And Barack Obama does too?  If so, both are dead wrong.

Mr Macintyre and the New Statesman being so isn’t a problem, but the President-elect’s supposed stance there is a great worry.  In fact, the article doesn’t seem ever to consider how the President-elect has little use even for the transnational NAFTA in his own backyard.  That in contrast to David Cameron and his party, which do endorse Britain’s EU membership.

Being so “well-read,” undoubtedly the President-elect is aware that it was the Conservatives who took Britain into the Common Market, which became today’s European Union.  That would make them far more continentally integrationist than Mr Obama and the mass of his own Democratic party.  Mr Macintyre has nothing to say about that either.

Or perhaps this blog has missed how the now President-elect and his party have heartily endorsed the creation of a true “American Union,” encompassing the entire Western Hemisphere, with its Brussels-like “capital” to be Panama City, its parliament to be housed in Vancouver, all national currencies scrapped and replaced with the “Amerigo,” and hemispheric monetary policy made in Brasilia?

For he and the Democrats couldn’t be such backwards “isolationists” in not wanting to see that dynamic, “broadminded, internationalism” transferred to the Western Hemisphere also?  Still, the last time anyone looked, and despite then candidate Sen Obama’s Berlin speechmaking reveries, the EU is not one “state,” but a grouping of independent countries.  (A Dutch neighbor of ours would probably faint at the assertion it isn’t: “The EU is about free trade and movement, not about destroying our individual countries!”)  Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel would likely also be among the first certainly to agree.

And even if the New Statesman somehow thinks otherwise.  Also that same “Labour source” feels the U.S. under an Obama ought to have a major say on Britain’s proper role within that EU?  Voicing that so casually is little short of shocking.  After all, the core criticism of the Bush administration from the British left has always been that Bush (he’s indeed a four-letter word to most of them) had attempted to control and direct the British “poodle.”

Obviously, though, the British left prefers Britain’s foreign policy be directed from a bit closer: Brussels.  Meaning, essentially Paris.  That Mr Cameron’s pro-Americanism and Atlanticism and, more importantly, his passion for “independent Britain” are rather at odds with that and also is well-reflective of the views of millions of other (definitely unimportant) British, is clearly immaterial.  Voters?  What the heck do they matter?:

…Cameron continues to preside over the most anti-European parliamentary party in Conservative history…

Mr Cameron’s and his party are undoubtedly just another bunch of “isolationist” bigots, backed by “isolationist” bigots.  It’s astonishing they are allowed in parliament.  One wonders, when does the party get “banned?“

But given those contrived parameters, the article actually makes sense, for the New Statesmen hopes, desperately, that President Obama and “Europe” will save the British left from the British voter.  After all, the publication, and increasingly it seems Labour, appear to have little use for an independent Britain.  Except when European institutions inexplicably step on Labour domestic power grabs, that is.

So that bizarre over-reading and interpretation of a supposed Obama slap at the man who will win the next election and become Britain’s next prime minister, is about what one would have expected from the New Statesman.