Not all circumspection is appeasement worthy of Neville Chamberlain comparisons.
Not all discretion is weakness. Not all caution is naiveté. Not all thoughtful deliberation is impotence.
Foreign policy is not about belligerence, bellicosity, the highest testosterone level or the biggest pair.
Foreign policy is foremost about attending to one’s national interest. For nobler countries, like ours and not Russia, it extends to pursuing human rights and justice and generally virtuous aims.
It fights only as a last resort and only for a higher morality and a clear end game with a smart exit strategy.
Sometimes, yes, it accidentally bombs a hospital.
Flak-jacketed and high-testosterone strutting by the Bush-Cheney administration pretty much got us where we are today: Iraq broken, ISIS risen and Afghanistan no less insoluble than when the pre-Putin Russians thought their mighty muscle could subdue it.
Appeasement of the Chamberlain sort, which is the accusation contemporary Republicans hurl against Barack Obama every time he declines to exhibit their idea of machismo, is declining to fight out of such fear of fighting that one is willing to cede power to the evil or the corrupt.
So that’s hardly the word for Obama.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is evil and corrupt. And it is Putin, not Obama, who more than appeases him, but sends his planes to subdue rebels against this man who bombs and poisons his own people.
It is Obama who holds to the notion that Assad must go.
Yet all we hear from Republicans and conservative pundits is that Obama is a clueless wimp and that Putin has played him for the weakling he is.
It is Obama’s fault, they say, that Putin, desperate to maintain Russian relevance amid a withering economy and sanctions, sends his war planes over Syrian rebel camps in pretense of fighting ISIS.
It is Obama’s fault, they say, that Putin threatens to commit a seemingly impossible error, that of rash unilateral action likely to make the Middle East somehow even more volatile.
No, Putin’s behavior is only Putin’s fault.
It would be conveniently acquiescent for Obama to go along even with his former secretary of state, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, and embrace a no-fly zone in Syria. But he thinks that’s too risky, possibly provoking a confrontation with Russia that would reap no clear or certain benefit.
He says rightly that it’s easier to run for president and spout than to be president and act. He knows because he’s done both.
Actually, Obama’s one egregious foreign-policy error — the one that allowed Putin to play him like a cheap fiddle — occurred when Obama drew a line in the sand against Assad and then backed down, or found a way out, when Assad crossed it.
The horrible error wasn’t the sane backing down — via the contrived arrangement by which Assad supposedly turned over his chemical arsenal to Putin. It was the bellicosity and tough-guy posturing in the first place. Obama’s mistake was that he ever strutted like a Bush or a Cheney or a Putin.
The braver and wiser thing for Obama now is to do as he is doing, which is hold to his position against Assad, intensify the vital anti-ISIS multinational coalition he leads and try to reason with the Russians if there is any reasoning with them to be done.
It is for him to go about his discreet and cautious business even as some of his fellow Americans, who once could be counted on to stick together in a Russian-distrusting position, accuse him of being a wussy chump against a vastly superior Russian example of the kind of manhood they admire.
They’re admiring desperation, dishonesty, conquest, rule-breaking, recklessness and villainy. They extol cynical tactics in a rival while they deplore discretion, circumspection, reserve and nobler global aims in their own.
I was in Moscow for several days nearly 24 years ago, a guest of a businessman who was trying to do ventures there until he got a pretty clear and menacing message from tough guys that his spirit of outsider entrepreneurship was no longer welcome.
I don’t think his coming home was weakness. I think his going in the first place was bravery.
One thing I remember from that trip is that, at a lengthy stop at a red light amid heavy traffic on a cold and sloppy late-January afternoon, guys from two vehicles in the adjoining lane got out of those vehicles and commenced vicious fist-fighting right there in the street.
Our driver merely laughed and accelerated away through the green light. I looked back to watch the raging interpersonal violence, which was still going as we made our way out of sight.
In a way, Putin is one of those guys. And some Americans are ashamed that their president isn’t the other.
We have road rage in America, too. But this president has not yet embraced it as his foreign-policy model, despite pressure to do so.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.