America’s Retreat Becomes a Fiasco in Russia as Well as Egypt

The events of the last week prompt me to write a sequel to last week’s column about the general withdrawal of the United States from world affairs.First, I retract my apology for having written that the Bust of Sir Winston Churchill in the Oval Office was returned by President Obama to the British. It was returned, and is now in the British embassy in Washington. Readers had, with perfect good faith, sent me a denial of that event from a White House official, which itself has now been retracted and made the subject of an apology from the official who wrote it.The bust of Churchill in the White House residence is not the one that was in the Oval Office; it was a gift from the British government to President Lyndon Johnson and has remained in the residence through the terms of nine presidents, including the incumbent. Mr. Johnson was the president of the United States when Sir Winston died in 1965 and had intended to lead the American delegation to his funeral, which would have been the only time an incumbent American president attended the funeral of a former British prime minister, but he came down with influenza and the U.S. delegation was headed by President Eisenhower and Chief Justice Warren.The brusque return of the Churchill bust, like the official American representation at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral earlier this year, by an already forgotten former ambassador to the country, illustrate the dilapidation of the alliance system under this administration and also illustrates the point I was making in last week’s column — though I now regret ever having raised the matter of that confounded effigy of Sir Winston.Of course, President Obama doesn’t have to have a bust of Churchill in his office, but there are more diplomatic things to do with it than dump it at the British embassy, just as he might have bestirred himself earlier to nominate a serious ambassador to the Court of St. James, a position that has been held by five presidents, five unsuccessful candidates for president, two vice presidents and four secretaries of State of the U.S., and many other distinguished people, including the eminent writers George Bancroft and James Russell Lowell.I promise not to raise this matter ever again in this column.***The intervening events that indicate that the U.S. administration is deliberately diminishing American influence in all the theatres of the world are the imbroglio over Edward Snowden in Russia, and the ludicrous fiasco of the visit of Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham to Egypt on the conceit that they have some standing to announce and enact American foreign policy.On the Russian front, Joe Biden’s infamously facile and simplistic reference to pushing the “reset button” in Russo-American relations looks more absurd than ever. The Obama administration has practiced over four years of appeasement of the Russians, including shortchanging the Poles and Czechs on missile defense and effectively admitting the legitimacy of the Russian first strike capacity for Central and Western Europe, and reducing nuclear armaments while failing to enlist any Russian support in discouraging Iran and North Korea from becoming nuclear military powers.The Snowden affair is an embarrassment from every possible angle. He was only a contractor, and it is shocking that he was able to download and remove and give away as much secret American surveillance information as he did; it makes a Swiss cheese of American national security confidentiality. And the cavalier manner in which the Chinese and Russians have given the backs of their hands to American attempts at extradition illustrates again the declining influence of the United States in the world. President Nixon or Reagan almost certainly would have been able to find something to trade those powers that did not affront American national integrity, in exchange for the return, or at least denial of asylum, to Snowden.But it also must be said that Mr. Snowden’s father, a retired officer of the U.S. Coast Guard, and his lawyer, have made a very effective case on television for the impossibility of Edward Snowden obtaining a fair trial if he were to face justice in the United States. Nobody does, as has been discussed in this space before — since prosecutors win 99.5% of their cases, so stacked is the procedural deck in their favor. And they win 100% of the cases where the accused is branded by the president of the U.S. as guilty and by prominent members of the Congress and administration day after day in the national media as a traitor and a monstrous criminal.The facts are that no country should have an extradition treaty with the United States; it is not, in criminal matters, a society of laws at all. Still, the United States is the world’s premier democracy and it does not lie in the mouths of the leaders of lawless dictatorships such as China and Russia, where dissenters are imprisoned and tortured, to invoke specious legal niceties as they stick their thumbs in the eye of the United States.As for the McCain-Graham trip to Cairo, the senators had no mandate whatever to make foreign policy, but took it upon themselves to tell the Egyptian government that the Senate would not vote the customary military aid budget to Egypt if the followers of the ousted Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, were not treated equitably. This sort of meddlesome egotism is misplaced when the Muslim Brotherhood is the beneficiary, and is far beyond the jurisdiction of two wandering legislators from Arizona and South Carolina. The Middle East is complicated enough without every pair of elected officials in Washington imagining that they can speak for America abroad.Perambulating senators make up foreign policy as they go, as President Obama, sand-bagged by the Congress, tries to regulate rather than legislate social policy. If this is how the United States is to govern itself, it does itself and the world a favor by scaling back its international ambitions. But it can’t withdraw and remain, any more than a person can suck and blow, at the same time.The Cold War was won by presidents who practiced peace through strength, particularly Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan: Berlin, Korea, the Marshall Plan, NATO, Atoms for Peace, Open Skies, Detente, SDI. If the United States is not prepared to be strong, it is correct to pull back. But when it withdraws, it should shed the illusion that it is in any position to coerce the Russians, or even the Egyptians, into anything, and will only embarrass itself when it tries.cbletters@gmail.com From the National Post.

America’s Retreat Becomes a Fiasco in Russia as Well as Egypt

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