Israel Matzav: Batten down the hatches

Batten down the hatches

Writing in the Weekly Standard, former Bush administration official Elliott Abrams urges a bunker mentality to fight the Obama administration's foreign policy, and calls on the spirit of Abrams' late mentor, Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson (D-Wash.) (pictured).

One begins to wonder how far we will drift into a new period of generalized disaster. In Honduras, we back the Hugo Chávez acolyte and say we won't respect November's free elections. In Israel, we latch on to the bizarre theory that settlement growth is the key obstacle to Middle East peace and try to bludgeon a newly elected prime minister into a freeze that is politically impossible--and also useless in actually achieving a peace settlement. In Eastern Europe, we discard a missile defense agreement with Poland and the Czechs and leave them convinced we do not mean to fight off Russian hegemony in the former Soviet sphere.

Manouchehr Mottaki, foreign minister of Iran, visited Washington, as noted, after such visits had been forbidden for a decade. High-ranking American officials have made six visits to Syria, even while the government of Iraq and our commanding general there complain of Syrian support for murderous jihadists. The highest ranking U.S. official to visit Cuba in decades recently toured Castro's tropical paradise. The president won't see the Dalai Lama, however, for fear of offending the Chinese.

See a pattern here? The president's U.N. General Assembly speech tied all this together, perhaps unintentionally: Talk of allies and enemies and national interests was absent. Getting something for concessions we make is contrary to the new spirit of engagement. The president, transcending all such anachronisms, poses as the representative of .  .  . the world. So why would his country treat friends better than foes, and why would we bargain for reciprocal concessions? So old fashioned, so Cold War.

Instead, he told us, "I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted--I believe--in a discontent with a status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences." (Did speechwriters substitute "discontent" for Carter's famous "malaise"?) So we will turn away from such thinking: "It is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009--more than at any point in human history--the interests of nations and peoples are shared." Acting in the narrow interests of the United States and its friends and allies is passé: "Because the time has come for the world to move in a new direction. We must embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect, and our work must begin now." This must sound to Ahmadinejad--or Putin or Assad or Chávez or Castro--rather the way Carter's call to end our "inordinate fear of communism" sounded to Brezhnev.

To those who do care about the interests of this country and its friends and allies, it should sound like a call to arms, leading us to ask how successful struggles to change America's foreign policy were waged in the past. In the 1970s, the headquarters of resistance to détente and its associated blunders was Room 135 in the Old Senate Office Building, which housed the foreign policy and national security staff of Democratic senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson.

I am convinced that if Scoop Jackson - for whom I worked during the 1976 Presidential Primary Campaign - were alive today, he would be a Republican and not a Democrat (and he'd take Joe Lieberman with him).

Israel Matzav: Batten down the hatches