On Saturday Russia marked the 70th anniversary of victory in Europe during World War II, with Moscow’s Red Square looking like a staging area for blitzkrieg. With 15,000 soldiers, 200 tanks and missile launchers, and 140 combat aircraft, the parade was a spectacle of bluster and intimidation.
The rest of the world was not amused. Barack Obama stayed away, as did the leaders of Britain, France and Germany. Not even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un showed up. It was Vladimir Putin home alone.
If President Obama had a sense of history, he might have thrown, in Washington, a more heartening party, to which V-E Day would serve only as prologue. Pride of place would go to the beginning of the most glorious chapter in American foreign policy, the Pax Americana that has held for 70 years and benefited not only the United States, but also the rest of the world.
The American-built postwar order is not ancient history; the story comes with a thoroughly modern moral. Success was not foreordained. As today, the U.S. in 1945 was tired and eager to go home. Meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta, Franklin D. Rooseveltconfided to “Uncle Joe” that he might give away the store. The U.S. would withdraw from the travails of the world; its troops would not stay in Europe for more than two years. Let Britain, France, Russia and the U.N. do it.
But fate intervened. FDR died two months after Yalta, and Harry S. Truman, the “little haberdasher” from Missouri, moved into the Oval Office. Truman grasped that Russia was not a partner in peace, but a rival in power, and disarmament stopped. In 1947 George F. Kennan published in Foreign Affairs his immortal article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” in which he laid out Washington’s strategy toward the U.S.S.R. The watchword was “containment”—to “confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world.”
Kennan, whom they seem not to read at Mr. Obama’s National Security Council, prescribed classical balance-of-power politics: thwart and hold, deter and defend. Yet the genius of American statecraft unfolded in the diplomatic arena. Like no other great power before, the U.S. designed institutions that shore up the flagging Pax Americana even today. It was arms plus architecture.
Look at the alphabet soup: U.N., NATO, IMF, WTO, along with the World Bank. All of them were good for America; selflessness is not a mark of the mighty. But these institutions lasted because they also served the interests of others by promoting such public goods as security, free trade, freedom of the seas, growth and stability.
Mr. Obama is into neither arms nor architecture. Instead of containment, his policy is self-containment. Instead of balancing against the expansionist du jour, America is balancing against itself. While Russia and China are increasing military spending by 10% and 15%, the U.S. is cutting into its military muscle (minus 6%). Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Obama’s strategy seems to be isolationism with drones.
Would Mr. Putin have moved into Ukraine if the U.S. still had a serious fighting force in Europe? Probably not. The Crimean grab mattered because it encouraged Moscow to go for southeastern Ukraine. The islands in the South China Sea claimed by Beijing aren’t merely specks in the Pacific. Challengers always start by probing the periphery and the solidity of alliance commitments. Will the U.S. side with its friends or merely act as arbitrator?
In his dreams, Mr. Obama sees revolutionary Iran as a partner in stability. That would be like FDR ennobling Stalin’s Russia as a guardian of the European peace. Pure fantasy. Why would Tehran play second fiddle to Washington if it wants to dethrone the U.S. as No. 1 in the Middle East?
Let’s consult Kennan again. He argued that Soviet Russia was ruled by a “mystical, Messianic movement,” as is revolutionary Iran. A regime that sees itself on the right side of history—or Allah—cannot be killed by kindness. Magnanimity toward it is seen as betraying weakness while validating the Messianic faith.
Mr. Obama should have known how the nuclear framework agreement announced last month would play out in Tehran. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei poured scorn on it, jacking up the price for a final deal. No surprise here, given Washington’s refrain that this is the best we can get. Kennan didn’t believe in concessions up front. To prevail, the U.S. had to “increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate” and so “force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation.” Just change “Kremlin” to “Tehran.”
Superpowers cannot go on vacation, not even for “a little nation-building at home,” to invoke Mr. Obama’s mantra. Woodrow Wilson’s America pulled back in 1919, lighting the fuse to World War II. FDR thought he could go home; luckily, Truman reversed course. Even Jimmy Carter, who invented the Russian reset in 1977 by proclaiming America “now free of that inordinate fear of communism,” shifted into rearmament when Moscow invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
The 44th president’s learning curve has been flat for six years. But wait: Didn’t he bare his teeth by refusing to attend the Moscow parade? Isn’t the U.S. Navy now escorting American ships in the Persian Gulf? Messrs. Putin and Khamenei are irked, but not impressed. Self-containment doesn’t breed credibility.
