One Perspective: The collapse of the Obama presidency?

Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire

For this week I was going to offer a different approach to ending the education achievement gap among our subcultures, but then Syria happened. President Obama threw the ball to the Congress to decide what, if anything, the United States should do seriously to punish Bashar al-Assad’s regime for violating international law.

American history is repeating itself; it’s a sad deja vu all over again. Only this time it is different. President Obama is not a Wilson, a Roosevelt, a Truman, an Eisenhower, a Kennedy, a Johnson, a Nixon, a Reagan, or a Bush — father or son.

Woodrow Wilson, a student of the presidency, once wrote: “The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit.”

This could be the collapse of Barack Obama’s power as president.

Obama is already both a weak president in fact and widely perceived as such around the world. His resolve is in question and so, in consequence, is the resolve of the United States.

Of the all the pundits I read in the last few days, the most important insight I came across was offered by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. In commenting upon the low level of public support for strong action in Syria, she suggested that people were against taking action mostly because they have no confidence in Obama as an effective executive. They don’t believe that he can lead the country to success. No polls show that Americans think Bashar al-Assad is a good guy. No intimations of “Ho Chi Minh-ness” in this case.

Thus, President Obama has lost the public trust in his competence. His presidency is coming under siege.

His diffidence as commander in chief should come as no surprise. The Harvard Law School does nothing to prepare one for command in war. The education in which Obama excelled is one in rationalizing, not deciding. A legal education does not build character but, on the contrary, enhances skills in finding superficial ways to slip through difficult situations without taking risks. It actually can undermine personal resolve.

As a rule, lawyers don’t have “skin in the game”; they give advice and frame arguments. They learn to marshal points on both sides of any issue. The old joke contains a lot of truth: Ask a lawyer how much 2 and 2 makes, and he or she will answer, “How much do you want it to be?”

War is not about talking; it is not the use of soft power. It is the accumulation of mass in human energy in order to break an enemy’s will. Clausewitz called it “an extension of policy by other means.” The “other means” to be used are an art unto themselves. And skill in that art demands firmness of character.

Obama’s track record in this regard is becoming a statistic. On health care, he passed the ball to Nancy Pelosi; on reforming Wall Street after its collapse in 2008, he turned to Larry Summers and congressional committees to come up with the Dodd-Frank legislation; when his appointees, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, came up with a plan to put the country on a sound fiscal footing for the long run, he rejected it; when implementation of health care ran into unexpected difficulty, he used regulatory sleight-of-hand on the part of his subordinates to patch the holes.

His administration is run by a White House coterie of “fixers”; his cabinet is not filled with rivals — existing or potential. (Clinton in the State Department was, and Kerry is, overseen by a large National Security Council staff loyal to the president that makes all important decisions.)

A Harry Truman he is not.

More worrisome to me is the president’s reduced stature among his peers. He could not get the G20 to sign on to a plan for Syria. A stunning failure of American leadership with little precedent. He has been checked by Russia’s Putin, who toys with him. From this kind of public belittlement, there is no certainty of ever coming back into prestige and prominence.

Our slippage relative to Putin is quite alarming. The best means for containing Assad and bringing down his regime would be to blockade his ports. Supplies for his army and economic sustenance for his supporters mostly flow through two smallish ports on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Blockading these ports would be most efficacious in the tit-for-tat of hard power competition.

But we can’t do this, as the Russian navy is right there blocking us. And, Russian anti-ship missiles provided to Assad are keeping our ships far from shore. Obama has been trumped by Putin, who knows a thing or two about playing rough and tough.

To be effective, President Obama has to raise the moral intensity of his cause. In the case of Syria, that is now easy to do.

The use of sarin nerve gas to kill your own citizens, as Assad did, not only violates international law, it rebukes the norms of civilization. The cause in Syria, therefore, is defense of human civilization against barbarism.

All America’s wars in the 20th century and in the first decade of the 21st century were fought in the name of higher values that support civilization against the dark forces within human nature. This current case of Syria is no different. Mostly our wars were fought against aggressors (World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I and Afghanistan). World War I and Iraq II were fought on behalf of democratic ideals to make the world “safe for democracy.”

The rule of international law that applies again in the case of Assad is called the “Responsibility to Protect.” The rule says: “State sovereignty implies responsibility and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself. Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.”

This is the “big idea” that President Obama could use to rally support for taking just remedial action against violation of law and the norms of civilization. But our president is not a man moved by big projects. He ran for re-election without having a platform of serious intentions other than his own victory over Mitt Romney.

Important causes, big ideas, high ideals make possible deeper conviction, greater resolve, and more courage to act. Leadership is the flowering of ethics; leadership is the personal passion and conviction that something must be done — now, and by us, not just talked about.

It’s Tuco’s memorable line in “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” when he is in the bath tub and shoots his hesitating assailant: “If you’re gonna shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”

As Napoleon once advised: “When you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.”

The ethical case for standing up to Assad’s barbarism is clear and convincing. The case for the United States to shoulder, once again, the burden of defending justice in the world is also clear and convincing. We are the guardians at the gate due to historical circumstance. It is our fate to be a force for good in the world and we should be proud of our capacity to take up the challenge and win it home.

We have made the world better before and we should do so again in Syria.