The Wages of Appeasement

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Human Events:

"Ask Osama bin Laden ... whether I engage in appeasement."
-- Barack Obama, Dec. 8, 2011

WASHINGTON -- Fair enough. Barack Obama didn't appease Osama bin Laden. He killed him. And for ordering the raid and taking the risk, Obama deserves credit. Credit for decisiveness and political courage.

However, the bin Laden case was no test of policy. No serious person of either party ever suggested negotiation or concession. Obama demonstrated decisiveness, but forgoing a non-option says nothing about the soundness of one's foreign policy. That comes into play when there are choices to be made.

And here the story is different. Take Obama's two major foreign-policy initiatives -- toward Russia and Iran.

The administration came into office determined to warm relations with Russia. It was called "reset," an antidote to the "dangerous drift" (Vice President Biden's phrase) in relations during the Bush years.

In fact, the Bush coolness toward Russia was grounded in certain unpleasant realities: the Kremlin's systematic dismantling of democracy; its naked aggression against Georgia; its drive to re-establish a Russian sphere of influence in the near-abroad; and its support, from Syria to Venezuela, of the world's more ostentatiously anti-American regimes.

Unmoored from such inconvenient realities, Obama went about his "reset." The signature decision was the abrupt cancellation of a Polish- and Czech-based U.S. missile defense system bitterly opposed by Moscow.

The cancellation deeply undercut two very pro-American allies who had aligned themselves with Washington in the face of both Russian threats and popular unease. Obama not only left them twisting in the wind. He showed the world that the Central Europeans' hard-won independence was only partial and tentative. With American acquiescence, their ostensibly sovereign decisions were subject to a Russian veto.

This major concession, together with a New START treaty far more needed by Russia than America, was supposed to ease U.S.-Russia relations, assuage Russian opposition to missile defense and enlist its assistance in stopping Iran's nuclear program.

Three years in, how is that "reset" working out? The Russians are back on the warpath about missile defense. They're denouncing the watered-down Obama substitute. They threaten not only to target any Europe-based U.S. missile defenses but also to install offensive missiles in Kaliningrad. They threaten additionally to withdraw from the START treaty, which the administration had touted as a great foreign-policy achievement.