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The Daily Signal
Obama’s
National Security Strategy Is Weak and Underwhelming
Nile Gardiner
February 06, 2015
President Obama’s new national security strategy will do little to
reassure America’s allies or intimidate America’s enemies.
Today, the White House unveiled a document poorly suited to the
challenges faced by the world’s superpower, which are mounting in the
Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa. At a time when American global
leadership is increasingly being challenged by an array of adversaries,
the new national security strategy sends a weak-kneed message on the
world stage.
Far from presenting a coherent foreign and national security strategy,
the Obama administration has merely offered a reheated and unconvincing
version of its “leading from behind” approach, couched in the veneer of
“smart power,” a phrase coined by former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton.
From the disastrous Russian reset, to the failure to halt the rise of
Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama doctrine has projected weakness,
indecision and dangerous mixed messaging. U.S. allies, from Israel to
Great Britain, have been treated with indifference and disdain, while
America’s enemies have been emboldened by what they see as an absence
of U.S. power and influence.
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At the core of the 2015 national security strategy (the first since
2010) is a failure to identify the enemy the United States and the free
world faces in the Middle East, and increasingly in the West as
well—Islamist terrorism and Islamist extremism.
The document steadfastly refuses to identify the ideological nature of
the foe the United States is confronting, a brutal and vicious
adversary that has made huge gains in Iraq and Syria under Obama’s
watch, and is attracting tens of thousands of self-styled Jihadists
from across the world, including several thousand from Europe. Nor does
the document outline a concrete strategy for defeating Islamist
terrorism, from Iraq to Nigeria and Pakistan to Yemen.
Any real strategic thinking is also notably absent from the White
House’s approach toward Iran and Russia. The harsh reality is that the
Obama presidency has no clear plan to halt Iran’s nuclear program or
Russia’s imperialist agenda in Eastern Europe.
On Iran, Obama has pursued a policy of appeasement in the guise of
nuclear negotiations with a tyrannical regime that has no intention of
giving up its nuclear ambitions.
On Russia, the president has acted like a deer in the headlights while
Putin’s tanks have rolled into Crimea, and his troops have marched into
Eastern Ukraine in their thousands in support of Moscow-funded
separatists. Obama has paid lip service to the NATO alliance while
doing nothing to strengthen it.
The White House’s deeply flawed national security strategy is a
reflection of a presidency in denial about declining American
leadership on the world stage. It is the antithesis of Ronald Reagan’s
peace through strength approach, and the mark of an administration that
is content for the United States to take a back seat on the world
stage, while the specter of terrorism and totalitarianism is on the
rise.
The American people deserve a strategy that ensures the United States
is kept safe, while its enemies are weakened and its allies
strengthened. The new national security strategy, unfortunately, fails
on all counts.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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