Day: January 1, 2014

How to stay out of trouble

It would be easy to be pessimistic about 2014.  But as Adam Gopnik cleverly illustrates it is really impossible to know whether we are on the Titanic, destined for disaster, or its twin the Olympic, which plied the seas for two more decades without faltering.

The question is what will keep America out of trouble?  How do we avoid the icebergs of contemporary international relations?  Gopnik suggests avoiding challenges to honor and face and worrying little about credibility or position.  This seems to me wise.  The question of reputation in international affairs is fraught, but anyone of the Vietnam generation will want to be skeptical about claims the United States needs to intervene in the world to prevent its reputation from being sullied or to prove its primacy.

Hubris is the bigger danger.  I, along with many others, don’t like the Obama Administration’s aloof stance towards Syria.  But the least good reason for intervention there is to meet the Russian challenge, reassert primacy in the Arab world or prevent others from thinking America weak.  We are not weak.  We are strong, arguably far stronger than we would have been had we intervened in Syria a year ago and gotten stuck with enhanced responsibilities there.  The reasons for intervention in Syria are more substantial:  the threat of a terror-exporting Sunni extremist regime either in Damascus or in some portion of a partitioned Syria as well as the risk to neighboring states (Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Israel) from Syrian collapse. Read more

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