I have experienced the terms of thirteen different U.S. presidents – starting with FDR. Troubling observation: each new president spends a good deal of his term attempting to right what his predecessor did wrong. The remainder of his term is spent making his own mistakes. His successor inherits the mess, and the cycle repeats.
Among other things this suggests there are few if any presidents wise enough to actually know, in the broadest sense, what in hell they are doing. When viewed dispassionately, the primary reason becomes obvious. Presidents are figureheads, enslaved by their own ideology, or that of their own close advisers, donors, and fellow travelers; hacks elected and appointed.
If a president doesn’t even have enough sense to gather the best, or at least competent, people around him, he or she is doomed to fail – a victim of consequences which hacks and journeymen have no foresight to anticipate. If ideology and political debt, rather than intelligent foresight (or at least clever chessmanship) guide a president’s decisions, these decisions are bound to produce unforeseen and unintended consequences of the worst kind, ultimately leading to failure. Most of the thirteen presidents I have seen have failed in this regard.
Of course, there are few decisions in this life which won’t lead to at least some unforeseen and unintended consequences. It’s a matter of how dire the consequences. Even smart advisers, those not ideologically driven, may fail to foresee the long-term consequences of what, at the time, at least to them, seemed like prudent decisions.
Critical decisions. Truman’s WWII-ending tactic. On the plus side, it brought WWII in the Pacific Theater to a quick end. On the other hand, it ushered in the horrors and fears of the Atomic Age. JFK’s decision as to how to handle the Cuban Missile Crisis? Reagan’s strategy in ending The Cold War? Perhaps Nixon’s opening up of relations with China seemed like a great decision at the time – but today’s China makes me think Nixon opened up a Trojan Horse.
Presidents before my time have brought about some terrible consequences. Instead of heeding Churchill’s admonition to “Love the Hun and kill the Bolshevik,” Woodrow Wilson inadvertently helped the Marxist take-over of Russia, which in turn brought the Iron Curtain thudding down on the USSR. Communist ideology spread like wildfire across the grasslands of the world, causing the deaths of tens of millions. FDR brought us his own vision, or perhaps the vision of someone close to him, of socialism; a somewhat unique American brand of welfare. Expanded dramatically by Lyndon Johnson, it changed Americans’ culture of self-reliance from what it was to what it is now; a quasi-socialist state in which a majority of voters would prefer subsidization to self-reliance, and are okay with submission to their government’s whims in return for subsistence and empty promises.
Which explains why President Bill Clinton made the kinds of popular decisions he did. And why George W. Bush made those he did, and why Barack Obama is still making the kind of decisions he is making.
But now we have this very serious situation involving Iran and nukes, which calls for decisions dictated not by a president’s ideology but by his and his advisers’ ability to foresee the full consequences of his decisions. Of course there will be some, unintended for sure, no matter which decision he makes. But as suggested earlier, it’s a matter of how dire the consequences might be. Decision “A” may work short-term, but may result in far worse consequences down the road than if the president went with plan “B.” Or “C” or “D.” For if anyone in the thrall of caliphate dreams is soulless, with the steely nerve of Harry Truman, the world may wake up one terrible morning to more Hiroshimas. One consequence of our President’s stubborn, ideological decision to essentially “do nothing” by kicking the can further down the road, leaving an even more impossible situation for his successor, may be a mushroom cloud over an American city, and a swath of radioactive death spreading across our land. Maybe across the city you live in.
Have you ever faced a bully? Let me ask you this; did “do nothing” ever work in dealing with a bully? If you haven’t, the answer is no. Bullies beg for confrontation. If you don’t want to get your ass handed to you by the bully, you must hand his ass to him. With prejudice. That bully will think twice, next time. And one unforeseen consequence may be that you actually gain his, and others’ respect.
President Obama is not likely to stop listening to whomever is advising him. He is not likely to set aside his hackneyed ideology. He is not likely to confront any of our enemies, or any of the crime and rebelliousness erupting on our own inner-city streets. His nature is to dread rejection. Bad press in England and Germany. Scorn from France. Humiliation in the eyes of UN “elites.” Anger toward him and his decisions by the muslim world. But at this point, regardless of which way he decides, he will get it all anyway. So he might as well do what needs to be done. After all, what’s the worst the rest of “the world” is going to do? Shake its trembling fingers at the U.S.? But Obama won’t do what needs to be done. He is unable. He doesn’t know how, and doesn’t have advisers who will tell him. He is on the glide path to be judged by history among the worst of our presidents; his only claim to immortality his election as America’s first black president.
If all negotiations fail to stop this nuclear weaponization, our next president, whoever he or she may be, does have a powerful military-diplomatic tool at their disposal. Plausible deniability. A terrible “accident” in the nuclear facilities of a nation warned about its efforts to become a nuclear power. Catastrophic. Messy.
When the alignment of our antagonists see (to quote Condi Rice) this “regrettable accident,” when they see the advancing of the evil cloud caused by their own illicit experiments, when the bullies see other irradiated leaders with blistered faces and singed hair glowing in the dark, you can count on one thing... without any physical proof they will know who made it happen, and they will rethink their ways.
Undoubtedly there will be many unintended and unknowable consequences to such a decision, but they are likely to be far less harmful to America than Obama’s strategy of loudly and proudly doing nothing.
