The World with No ‘Police’

In recent times, the world has watched with horror the chilling images that clamor for solutions. That scene of dozens of Syrian children gassed cannot be erased from the mind. Or the one of the death, destruction and displacement in the Gaza Strip, or even the weeping of Israeli soldiers over the loss of a partner. Or the one of the downed commercial airplane in Ukraine and, in these days, the ruthless persecution of Christians in Iraq by the Islamic State [of the Levant].

Such a succession of shocking facts, beyond ideologies, religion, interests of power or oil, suggests, above all, that something is happening with the chess of world politics, and in particular with the role of the U.S. as the “world’s police” and its seemingly lukewarm foreign policy.

The dilemma of the superpower — that if it intervenes with the entire force of its resources it becomes “interventionist and imperialist,” and if it does nothing, it becomes the accomplice of a genocide — seems to have been resolved by Barack Obama’s administration with a less idealistic, more practical attitude.

Interestingly, that attitude increases the perception that other leadership is emerging as a counterweight to the U.S. and that [these leaders] seem to be reviving past cold wars. In Syria, Moscow won the hand by avoiding a Western military offensive and mediating for the bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad to hand over its stockpile of chemical weapons. The bleeding continues, but the fact that the rivals of al-Assad are now, in part, extreme terrorists groups like ISIL takes eyes and internal pressures away from the conflict.

In Iraq, the White House has opted for a “humanitarian” intervention, which leaves both Republican hawks and Democrats happy, but which, in the end, does not solve the crisis. The investment in the education and training of a national army that fled in a stampede was questioned, but the surgical bombings and the [creation of] humanitarian passages are attempts to avoid a “genocide,” as explained by Obama. Likewise, the oil wealth of the country is safe and sound in southern Basra. And he doesn’t risk one soldier.

As for Gaza, after the failure of mediation at resuming peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis, the U.S. has not strayed from its traditional line of putting Israel’s security above any other consideration. The funding for the Iron Dome missile defense system helps make this country an increasingly secure place. And, despite its calls for truces and condemnations of the excessive violence, it lets Netanyahu’s government be.

In Ukraine, Russia managed to snatch Crimea, but Obama took a gamble by using economic sanctions, something that costs him less and prevents future separatist incursions, although he knows that the ones who will pay the piper will be Ukraine’s European allies, faded by their economic crisis and hostages to their dependence of Russian gas.

He has asked them for more cohesion and even military strengthening, as if the U.S. was telling them that the Ukrainian mess was their responsibility and Uncle Sam will not always come to their aid every time the bear growls.

There are too many open crises to aspire to success, along with the fact that Obama’s administration wants to give priority to its domestic problems and not to situations that, no matter how much it intervenes, it won’t be able to solve. Less idealism, more pragmatism. With minimal effort and little internal political strain, Obama seeks to obtain revenues more suited to the reality of the U.S. national interests than to what the world expects of him.