Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest National Review Online column delves into the president’s possible steps in foreign policy in the months ahead.
In terms of the Obama presidency, there is now no anti-war movement. It simply vanished in January 2009. Former outrages like Guantanamo, renditions, and Predator-drone assassinations almost magically became A-okay. The left-wing base dared not continue its old Bush slurs, given its support for Obama’s liberal domestic agenda. Quiet conservatives were perplexed over whether to be outraged that Predator-in-Chief Obama proved to be such an abject hypocrite, or relieved that, better late than never, he had morphed into a Bush-Cheney national-security disciple.
The result is that for the next year or so, Obama can more or less do whatever he wishes abroad. If he chooses to bomb a country that poses no direct threat to the U.S. without congressional authority, like Libya, or to assassinate a U.S. citizen-terrorist, like Anwar al-Awlaki, the Left will keep mum. And the Right, for different reasons, probably will, too.
What, then, should we expect abroad in the waning months of Obama’s four-year term, with continuing economic bad news at home?
Suddenly, intelligence agencies at the U.N., and in the U.S. and Europe — after once denying, during the supposedly trigger-happy Bush administration, that Iran was close to getting a bomb — now warn us that Tehran may actually test a nuclear weapon after all. Iran poses an existential threat not only to Israel, but to the entire notion of nuclear nonproliferation in the key oil-exporting Gulf. Its missiles could reach southern Europe.
If we get to the scary point of Iran’s going nuclear in 2012, expect the Obama administration — up for reelection and without much of a domestic record to run on in these hard times — to consider a preemptive strike.
