Barack Alone
Obama is more isolated internationally than his surprise Nobel might lead one to believe.
Back in the day, the mainstream news media used to revel in the political misfortunes of the European leaders that had supported George W. Bush and “his” Iraq war. The depiction of their downfalls constituted a veritable morality play. Think José María Aznar, Silvio Berlusconi, and Tony Blair. Never mind that both Aznar and Blair left office of their own volition, Blair after leading his Labor Party to victory in the 2005 British elections. As for Aznar, keeping a longstanding promise, he declined to seek a third term even though all the polls showed that his Popular Party would cruise to victory in the March 2004 Spanish elections. Never mind that the PP would then go down to a surprise defeat only after a terrorist attack killed nearly 200 people in Madrid just days before the vote, thus putting Spaniards on notice that support for America would be paid for in their blood. Never mind the facts. The grand narrative of the European masses rising up against the “deeply unpopular” Iraq war dictated that the (supposed) difficulties of the Bush allies had to be the story.
If Aznar, Berlusconi, and Blair were the villains in this narrative — traitors to the law-abiding, peace-loving European cause — the heroes also came in three: German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the dynamic French duo of President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. Oddly enough, however, when these leading lights of the Franco-German “axis of peace” themselves went down to defeat or bowed out without a fight as their electoral prospects dimmed, this was not a story.
The first to go was Schröder. In September 2002, Schröder had gained reelection by a razor-thin margin after campaigning on a platform of fervent and categorical opposition to what was at the time the mere possibility of an American-led military intervention in Iraq. In September 2005, two and a half years after the war had become a reality, he would be defeated by Angela Merkel by a still narrow, but more substantial, margin.
A year and a half after that, it was Jacques Chirac’s turn to go, as he handed over power in May 2007 to Nicolas Sarkozy, his bitter inner-party rival in the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). Earlier, there had been some talk of Chirac seeking a third term. But with his approval ratings mired at depths never before seen in the history of the Fifth Republic, there was never any serious chance of that. In July 2006, the number of respondents expressing confidence in Chirac bottomed out at 16 percent in the monthly “barometer” of French polling firm TNS-Sofres. No other French president had ever fallen below 30 percent in the poll. (For more on the subject, see here.)
There was also some talk of Chirac passing the Gaullist baton to his protégé de Villepin, who had in the meanwhile been promoted to prime minister. But with his own polling numbers closely tracking those of Chirac, de Villepin’s prospects of challenging Sarkozy for the UMP nomination were hardly any better. He is presently on trial in Paris for his alleged role in the so-called Clearstream Affair, an apparent attempt to use forged documents to discredit Sarkozy and derail his presidential aspirations.
But the ignominious end of the Chirac-de Villepin era in France did not represent the last gasp of the “axis of peace.” As a result of the narrowness of her 2005 victory, Chancellor Merkel had been forced into a “grand coalition” government with Schröder’s Social Democrats and forced to accept Schröder’s former chief of staff, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, as her foreign minister. Although less flamboyant than the indicted French diplomat and poet, Steinmeier had been something like de Villepin to Schröder’s Chirac — or perhaps, more exactly, like Chirac to Schröder’s de Villepin. For even if Schröder was the angry public face of the German component of the “axis of peace,” in German policy circles it is widely believed that the idea of going on the offensive against the Bush administration had originated with Steinmeier. Now, however, Steinmeier has himself gone down to a crushing defeat in the German elections. With Steinmeier as their chancellor candidate, the Social Democrats pulled merely 23% of the vote, barely more than half of their total in 1998 when Schröder was first elected chancellor. The final vestige of the “axis of peace” will thus be leaving the halls of European power.
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John Rosenthal’s writings on European politics and transatlantic relations have appeared in English, French, and German in such leading publications as Policy Review, Les Temps Modernes, and Merkur. He holds a PhD in philosophy and he taught political philosophy and classical German philosophy before turning to journalism. More of his work can be found at Transatlantic Intelligencer.
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13 Comments
1. Marc Malone:Oh, look! The Surge worked! Victory in Iraq! All you guys who opposed it… You are sooo outta here! Victory in war has real prizes every time. We don’t pillage and plunder anymore (sigh), but the political prizes are yet ever so sweet.
It sure helps to back the winner!
Oct 13, 2009 - 3:54 am 2. Pity Pity Poop:So, now that the rest of the world can see that Obama is a hopeless loser are we supposed to feel sorry for him?
Oct 13, 2009 - 4:35 am 3. Proud_Kafir7908:While the analysis of the fate that befell those who opposed the Iraq war is quite interesting, I think they’ve got what they deserved mostly because they’re all surrender-monkeys to mahoundianism than because of the opposition to the war itself. A war that, as events on the ground have shown, can’t be won, for A-rabs do not think like we Westerners do, and never will.
As Hugh Fitzgerald and Craig Winn have stated repeatedly, continued waste of money and materiel in both Iraq and Afghanistan can in no way bring any benefits to Western civilization at all. We would be much better off if there were in this world more political leaders like Geert Wilders and Benjamin Natanyahu, who truly understand mahoundianism and jihad (and have the guts to suggest that access to the West be denied to those inbred bedouin savages, while the use of force against their aggression should never be off the table), and who are also capable of seeing the threat posed to the West by that cult for what it truly is; unlike Bush, who, while publicly acknowledging how evil Saddam Hussein was, at the same time always referred to the Saudi Royals, the West’s most dangerous enemies, as “our allies”, when nothing could be further from the truth. And if we were tempted to think that Bush’s approach was about as bad as it could get, Buraq Hussein Obama has, on the other hand, extended Bush’s selective love of the West’s worst foes to absolutely every single one of them, from the UAE and Saudi Arabia to Porkistan and the Taliban.
The only good thing in all of this is that a deservedly weak and defeated Buraq Hussein will not be able to force Netanyahu to surrender Israel to Jordanian and Egyptian A-rab squatters illegally occupying Jewish land in the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria.
Oct 13, 2009 - 5:51 am 4. Bohemond:Of course, John, the Nobel Hatebush Prize was awarded by a committee of five Norwegians, four of whom are off on the Socialist International/Green kook Left. Not much resemblance or connection even to the old Eurobosses, except Zapatero and perhaps German ex-FM Fischer.
Oct 13, 2009 - 6:37 am 5. vivo:4. Bohemond:
“Of course, John, the Nobel Hatebush Prize was awarded by a committee of five Norwegians, four of whom are off on the Socialist International/Green kook Left.”
OK, let’s make a Nobel Prize committee with 5 red-blooded conservatives. Future recipients? Peacemakers Limbo, O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck and future GOP prez candidates. Happy now?
Oct 13, 2009 - 7:41 am 6. misanthropicus:It is too early to come with a definitive description of the Iraq as a success or a failure – while the mixture of news coming from there is often exasperating, in the long term it might well happen that Bush’s decision will be praised.
As far as the European opposition at that date (I remember the troika Villepin, Ivanov and Schroeder marching on a UN hall, there to huff & puff & shake things), that came from various, and even mutually antagonistic causes, a rather opportunistic affair which was described in exagerated terms by the always available “usual idiots” of media, there and in America -
With no authentic necessity of opposing America in Iraq, after some fiery rhetoric and gesticulation, things have quietly returned to the prior configuration – everyone wants to do business in Washington, and the irony here is that in this configuration Obama is a man of the past, but of an “un-defining” past (gosh, Obama’s “defining” and “distraction” are contagious), world politics present & future being largely carried on the lines drawn by Bush and Cheney.
Heh! Transformational presidencies sure have a malicious life of their own – Obama’s compulsion for public grandstanding amputated by the next election (if not by his ilegitimacy problem that simply doesn’t go away), we’ll probably see him near Schroeder in the Gazprom board of directors or something similar.
Oct 13, 2009 - 8:52 am 7. misanthropicus:RE #5/vivo: [..] 5. vivo: [...] OK, let’s make a Nobel Prize committee with 5 red-blooded conservatives. [...]
Wrong, mon pauvre Vivo – no conservative would go for such an unseemly and base job like a Nobel Prize committee member.
Oct 13, 2009 - 9:01 am 8. misanthropicus:And as far as future Nobel recipients, relax, Limbo, O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck are nowhere on the Nobel list – the next years’ prizes will go to Mumia Jabal, then to Polansky, Bill Ayres, Rangel and other figures from liberals’ pantheon -
You ARE the happy man, vivo -
RE #7/5 vivo:
More great news for you, vivo, I just learnt that NAMBLA and Kevin Jennings have made the cut for future years’ Nobel Prize -
Oct 13, 2009 - 9:16 am 9. Professor Guvinoff:George Bush disturbed the falsely comfortable standards and practices in which you were supposed to accomodate the Arabs by the word instead of opposing their islamic proclivities by the sword.
Obama is an after-effect of the thusly toppled applecart, still brandishing the word and burying the sword, in a futile attempt to share attitudes which the Europeans have already abandoned in the meantime.
The nominal leader amuses himself by following the nominal followers, and they give him the lollipop! We are getting drunk with the dividends of poetic justice while the mullahs are sending money and hardware to their surrogates, and preparing to launch missiles of the ballistic variety.
Indulging in reaction in a situation asking for action is a delinquency of the presidential duties.
Oct 13, 2009 - 1:39 pm 10. Hod Coburn:The Nobel Peace Prize
Oct 13, 2009 - 5:29 pm 11. ddc:What a joke. This is not Teddy Roosevelt brokering a peace between Russia and Japan, this is Obama delivering speaches via teleprompter on the television.
If anyone didn’t realize what a joke Al Gore’s Peace prize was for making a propaganda video a few years ago they should surely realize what a farce the Nobel awards have become to date.
For crying out loud, why didn’t tax cheat Geithner get the award for economics?
The Nobel prize is nothing but professional wrestling with a suit on. What a joke!
wow! this is one of the most insightful and, in my opinion, accurate portrait of the international “axis of peace” (fools) political scene leading up to Obama.
Obama is a little too late at the table to matter to those who will step up to Iran on the international front. with Iran (sarcastically no doubt) calling him “brave” after dissing our eastern european allies in the name of “dialog” and with Chavez questioning his Nobel prize, he truly IS alone and due to his naivete…dangerous.
Obama’s Legacy: Worst President, replacing Carter, in US history.
Oct 13, 2009 - 10:24 pm 12. Marc Malone:#5 vivo – Here’s where you demonstrate that you really don’t understand Conservatives. For the Left, it’s all politics all the time. They are the revolutionaries. Conservatives represent the traditional. If Conservatives ran the committee, you would see reasonable selections being made, not political ones. In fact, you probably wouldn’t see the choices, as they wouldn’t make much splash for the media.
My choice would go to Columbia’s leader, when he snookered the cartels into giving up the hostages. He simply made a statement for freedom for the hostages and for their own country. No more corruption. No more extortion. It was a signal of Columbia’s blooming freedom. Good for him.
Oct 15, 2009 - 2:39 pm 13. redball6:Why would any reasonably thinking person ever again elect a Democrat to a national office based upon their almost total lack of common sense and the almost complete lack responsible thinking? It appears as the people sitting in the chambers of government and walking the halls are almost totally devoid of insight.
They are bereft of rational thinking about their place in the national social upheaval and revolution taking place before their eyes. This revolution is national, not
dictated by zip code.
Many if not most of “US” have come to see the government not as servant of the public but as a “SERPENT” which has snaked its way into our lives to constrict our freedoms and remove opportunities for “US” to succeed. And yes it is ultimately “WE” or “US” who are responsible for this.
Blaming the media is not an answer. “WE” at our local precinct level must be involved. It is we the citizens who must VET the individual who seeks our vote. We can’t rely on the press, or either an any party(s) ringing endorsement of a given candidate
As I said in a previous post “The Democrat Party sits astride a great fault line in American politics. It is not listening to the country, it is however listening to its special interests. This will likely be their undoing on 11, 3, 2010. The GOP and libertarians are working their trap lines. However the GOP had better do its homework, zip code by zip code if it wants to insure victory in 2010.
We must not rely on the “O” mans action or lack there of, to help to insure victory. The message trumps the “O” mans personality and his message has been and continues to be rejected. “O” is in the process of crippling himself. But “O” posses the capability to turn swiftly and attack from an oblique angle.
The GOP and libertarians this time must carefully craft the message. Otherwise 2012 could bring for more years in the socialist wilderness and once again ring in Chicago style. I like Chicago Style, but for me its limited to hot dogs.
Check “6″
Oct 16, 2009 - 7:53 pm