Return of the wise men

15 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, what does the world look like?  For the past eight years the Obama Administration and their allies in the media have promoted a “narrative” that portrayed Obama’s withdrawal from national security as enlightened relief from the hawkish excesses of the Bush-Cheney years.  

Except as we look around the world, the results of that withdrawal are frightening, and destabilizing.  Chinese belligerence in the South China Sea.  Russian jets and Iranian attack boats buzzing U.S. warships and planes.  American hostages ransomed for $400 million.  Russian occupation of a sovereign country, and Russian military massing near NATO’s borders.  Brutal attacks take place in Paris, San Bernardino, the Brussels Airport, Istanbul, Orlando, Dhaka in Bangladesh, Wurzburg and Ansbach in Germany, and at a celebration in Nice and a sacred worship service in Rouen in France.  

{mosads}After the horrific attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney vowed that no other attack would take place on our soil.  “Fight them over there, to keep them from coming here,” was the shorthand for it.  But since 2009, ISIS sprang up in the vacuum left in Iraq when Obama withdrew American troops after failing to negotiate a Status-of-Forces Agreement.  The narrative explaining that failure was written like a cheap novel by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, who proudly dismissed the national security establishment as irrelevant.  Rhodes likewise narrated the success of the JCPOA, Obama’s submissive prostration to Iran that unfreezes $100 billion and is allowing them to develop a nuclear program while threatening Israel and the Gulf with Russian S-400 missiles.  Distinguished career diplomats and officers were ignored.

Now, former CIA Director James Woolsey said, “The Russians are running a foreign policy very much the way Hitler did from 1933 to 1939. The Chinese are trying to take over the South China Sea. ISIS is … murdering people, burning them alive and trying to expand into a caliphate….”   Indeed, Vladimir Putin is the dominant world leader, and is undermining European governments that condemn his seizure of Ukrainian territory.  At NATO’s Warsaw Summit in July it was clear that a Russian invasion of the Baltics or Poland, or closure of the Suwalki Gap, is a very real possibility.  

But the national security establishment was right, and the novelist was writing fiction, and the scales have fallen from the eyes of American voters, on both sides of the political aisle.  Once again, the national security establishment must come in and fix a world broken by idealistic dreamers who ignored the experience of decades.  When we look at Truman and Kennedy’s Wise Men who created containment to stop Communist aggression, or Nixon’s pragmatic realists who divided China from Russia, or Reagan’s hawks who rolled back the Soviet empire and liberated half of Europe, or Bush who promised “this will not stand,” or the unapologetic Bush-Cheney attacks on America’s enemies in defense of liberty, we see a long bipartisan tradition of standing up for American interests.  

That tradition has not died, but has only been dormant during the Obama years.  Time is running out for ISIS, bringing the criminals and dregs of the Islamic world to the empty lands between Iraq and Syria, pretending to establish a caliphate; for Vladimir Putin, systematically employing propaganda and all the repressive tools of both Communists and tsars to loot the proud, ancient land of Russia, while destabilizing Europe and the Mediterranean. It’s running out for al qaeda, pathetically trying to regain the leadership of the most degenerate elements of those who corrupt Islamic thought in order to justify their violent lust for power; for the Taliban, who hope to return from their hovels to subject women to servitude and kill anyone who stands for liberty, while reaping billions of opium dollars.  Time is running out, because the national security establishment is coming back.

When it does, the U.S. government will act once again in the interests of the United States, stand once again with our allies and actively oppose the new axis of evil.  They will recognize Ukraine as a battleground between those who desire liberty and an alliance with the West, and those who want to remain under the control of Putin.  Eventually the Russian people will tire of Putin’s propaganda and adventurism, and send him the way of the tsars as they almost did in the protests of 2011-2013; the Middle East will return to American partnership; and the free world will welcome the return of American leadership.  

Bart Marcois is a former career Foreign Service Officer, and was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy for International Affairs during the Bush Administration.

The views expressed by authors are their own and not the views of The Hill.