Obama’s Return

Obama’s Weak Stance Has Resulted in a Far-Reaching Vacuum

A turnaround in Barack Obama’s presidency, which could have consequences for world politics, has become apparent recently. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and commander in chief of the United States Armed Forces, who wanted to put an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is intervening massively in a military conflict. A general at the Pentagon confirmed after the first airstrikes against positions held by the terrorist regime “Islamic State” that this war could last many years.

In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama spoke of a “crossroads between war and peace; between disorder and integration; between fear and hope,” identifying “the cancer of violent extremism that has ravaged so many parts of the Muslim world” as the greatest danger of all. It is reported that America is working with a broad coalition to “dismantle this network of death.”

It is understandable that, after the Bush administration’s excessive interventions and the military withdrawal from the Middle East during the first six years of the Obama era, the president’s “belated awakening,” as the New York Times describes it, is met with some reservation. Indeed, exactly one year ago, Obama had told the U.N. General Assembly that “a decade of war” had come to an end and that the world had become “more stable.”

After the cancellation of the announced airstrikes against the army of the beset Syrian dictatorship, after the wreckage of the crisis in Gaza and after the deadlock in the nuclear dispute with Iran, there was a huge gap between rhetoric and reality. The threat of irreparably losing face was real.

Obama’s weak stance, called “soft diplomacy” by many liberals, and the withdrawal of the essential democratic stabilizing power has left a far-reaching vacuum in the Middle East (and elsewhere!). Not only the Islamic State terrorists, but also nationalists in Moscow and Beijing have interpreted the United States’ concentration on domestic policy and avoidance of the flashpoints as weakness and carte blanche for aggression.

German Middle East expert Volker Perthes indicates that the description of the Islamic State as a “terrorist militia” plays down the situation, particularly as the extremists already control one-third of Syrian and Iraqi territory — home to 8 million people. American experts estimate that 15,000 citizens from 80 countries, which include 2,000 Europeans and 100 Americans, are fighting in Iraq and Syria.

The Islamic State group’s mobile units are not only destroying what is left of Syria and Iraq, but they are also threatening Kurdish settlements as well as the border regions in neighboring Turkey. When faced with the danger of worldwide attacks ranging from France and Belgium to Algeria and Indonesia, the U.N. general security council requested that all countries impose harsh penalties for those engaging in so-called “terror tourism.”

The challenge that terrorism poses, therefore, seems to be a real wake-up call; not only for the pensive president, but also for America’s elite, which constitutes the essential anchor of the global order.