As President Obama tightens our “rela tions” with the mythical “interna tional community,” our enemies and competitors are exploiting the Bush approach of building coalitions of the willing.
Preferring small, ad-hoc groupings to permanent, worldwide institutions (like the United Nations) didn’t come naturally for George W. Bush. His father, after all, had been a UN ambassador and was steeped in internationalist traditions.
Internationalism was fine and dandy when the UN and NATO went along with W’s plan to invade Afghanistan. But when it came to Iraq, France and others decided they’d rather stick with Saddam — so W shrugged and replaced old alliances with willing friends in Britain and “New Europe.”
We can argue endlessly about the Iraq War, but the horror and dismissal that greeted that “coalition of the willing” in Obama’s circles were certainly over the top.
Now the idea isn’t being so cavalierly dismissed around the world, where small groups often form to advance the interests of like-minded countries.
* Last week, in Astana, Kazakhstan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad added several lines about shaking the world order to a speech featuring his usual anti-Semitic bile. The time has come, he said, to overthrow the “slavers and colonizers of the past” (hint: us).
The occasion was a gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a group of six mid-Asian countries founded in 2001 to counterbalance NATO. Led by Russia and China, the SCO has attracted such countries as Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia, which have joined as observers.
* At the UN Security Council last week, a European-backed resolution to condemn Syria ran into a wall of BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa formed a bloc opposing the mere mention of Syria at the council.
Not that all the BRICS have a direct interest in keeping Bashar Assad in power — actually, only Russia does. But after beings lumped together for years as a group of emerging world-leading economies, the BRICS are now starting to coordinate as a political bloc in world affairs, displaying new diplomatic muscle that competes with ours.
* The German newspaper Die Welt reported that Iran recently signed a pact with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez to deploy Iranian-made Shahab missiles in his country. With a range of 900 miles, a Shahab-3 can nearly reach Miami from Venezuela. Oh, and soon it may be able to carry nuclear warheads.
Iran is also tightening relations with Nicaragua, Bolivia and other Chavez allies in our hemisphere.
* Saudi Arabia recently shook the Arab world when it added Jordan and Morocco to the Gulf Cooperation Council, formerly a backwater. The idea — as the Arab Spring threatens the old order — is to allow Arab monarchies to cooperate outside the older, dysfunctional Arab League.
In each case, the organizing theme is “small is beautiful.” A few countries that share common interests can better perform tasks that can’t get the backing of every country on earth. Even Islamist terror groups now cross the Shia-Sunni divide to form al Qaeda’s version of regional “coalitions of the willing.”
Guess who isn’t hip to the trend? Us.
We allowed the UN and the outdated Arab League to dictate the Libya war mandate and relinquished our NATO leadership, allowing the war to be designed by committee instead — a foolproof recipe for the fiasco our war effort has become.
We weren’t always in awe of stodgy world bodies. In World War II, we led the Allies; US-led NATO saved Europe from communism during the Cold War; both Bushes created and led wide coalitions to fight the two Iraq wars.
But now, just as we face formidable new dangers, we’re no longer interested in leading coalitions of countries that mostly agree with our values. Instead, Obama endlessly speaks, in the name of the “international community,” to theArab “world,” while neglecting “lesser” (but true) allies.
While he addresses le tout le monde, our worst enemies successfully team up with just about anyone who’s willing to compete with us for world leadership.
But, hey, the old Turtle Bay bureaucrats like us much better these days.
Twitter: @bennyavni
