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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Thursday, February 19, 2015 | A11
OPINION
onventional explanations
for Barack Obama’s foreign
policy need an update. Mr.
Obama’s famous indecision or
antipathy to America’s traditional
postwar role in the world all have
had their moment. They inform
an understanding of this president’s worldview—up to a point.
We have reached that point.
They are not enough.
In just the past
few weeks, the
following events
have happened.
They are a blur
of chaos and bruWONDER tality.
Islamic State
LAND
videotaped
its
By Daniel
beheading of 21
Henninger
Coptic Christians
in Libya and
Egypt’s bombed Islamic State
camps in retaliation. An ISIS sympathizer sprayed bullets into a
free-speech meeting in Copenhagen. A 4,000-man army post in
Yemen was overrun by fighters
from al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula. Russian-supported rebels in
Ukraine commenced an artillery
barrage on Kiev’s forces inside the
city of Debaltseve after the grand
cease-fire brokered by Germany
and France.
Jordan’s King Abdullah asked
the U.S. to send aircraft parts and
munitions after ISIS immolated a
caged Jordanian pilot. Nigeria’s
homicidal Islamic jihadist group,
Boko Haram, extended its assaults
into Niger and Chad. Both Italian
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al
Sisi separately called on the United
Nations, of all things, to organize a
coalition to clean up Libya. A
Jewish cemetery in France was
smashed to pieces.
The reaction of the U.S. government to all this?
The White House this week assembled a “summit” on “countering violent extremism,” where on
AFP/Getty Images
C
Obama’s Brutal Foreign Policy
Missiles launched by Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, Feb. 18.
Wednesday Mr. Obama restated
the difference between Islam and
the perversion of Islam.
Ukraine’s embattled army, encircled in the strategic railway city
of Debaltseve by rebels using
Russian artillery and tanks, desperately needed defensive military
equipment from the U.S. They
didn’t get it. On Tuesday Vladimir
Putin said they should surrender.
On Wednesday, hours before Mr.
Obama spoke to the extremism
summit, they gave up.
Islamic State’s videotaped barbarism expands, but the U.S. commitment against them in Iraq and
Syria will not move beyond limited
airstrikes.
Nigeria, like Libya and Iraq, is a
nation of vast oil revenue for whoever controls it. Nigeria’s chance
of getting support from the Obama
administration before it falls into
chaos is zero, no matter how many
girls Boko Haram kidnaps.
It is a mistake to think that Mr.
Obama’s passivity or indecision
are sufficient explanation. What is
on offer here is the American left’s
version of realpolitik. The decision
by the Obama White House not to
deploy American resources is
thought-out, brutal and unapologetic.
President Obama in his Feb. 6
national-security statement explained what he is doing—or not
doing. He was precise and clear:
“We have to make hard choices
among many competing priorities
and we must always resist the
overreach that comes when we
make decisions based upon fear.”
Short version: He’s not spending real money on any of this. Get
over it.
There is an important difference between left-wing realpolitik
and the conservative realpolitik
normally associated with Henry
Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft.
The conservatives’ version was
about making choices among
competing uses of American military resources abroad. Left-wing
realpolitik has no serious interest
in the world beyond America’s
borders.
The only realism the left admits
to is what it sees as a U.S. beset—
forever—by poverty, economic injustice and “unmet needs.” Thus
Mr. Obama produces a $3.99 trillion budget to end “mindless austerity.” The world beyond this is a
footnote.
In her speech last week at the
Brookings Institution, National
Security Adviser Susan Rice made
BOOKSHELF | By Laura Vanderkam
this priority clear: “Before I go
through the elements of this strategy, I want to note how our
approach may differ from what
others may recommend. We believe in the importance of economic growth, but we insist upon
investing in the foundations of
American power: education and
health care; clean energy and
basic research.”
The Democratic left’s worldview was defined forever by the
Vietnam War. LBJ’s budget got
caught between guns for Vietnam
and butter for the Great Society.
Barack Obama is refusing to be
trapped by this dilemma. The
Obama legacy will be about butter, and a bedeviled world can
take the hindmost.
This is foreign-policy reductionism, and it has consequences.
One, occurring now, is the
functional death of human rights,
an achievement claimed by Democratic liberal internationalism.
The rescue of the Yazidis from
genocide was an act forced by
political necessity.
Once you’re out of the world
(“competing priorities”), serious
strategy becomes impossible to
shape or execute. The Obama
anti-ISIS “coalition” is essentially
a pick-up basketball team without
a coach. That video of Mr. Obama
shooting air baskets in the Oval
Office and giving himself a fistpump for the effort about sums
up the U.S.’s virtual foreign policy.
Leftist
realpolitik—melting
guns so it can churn more butter—may survive a pullout from
the world in normal times. But
it’s not going to hold for the next
two years, not at this pace, not
with Islam’s jihadists using social
media to make all of us party to
the de-civilizing of the world.
Eventually Barack Obama will
be forced to act, or his presidency
will erode politically, taking many
Democrats with him.
Write to [email protected]
A GOP Lifeline on Immigration—If They’ll Take It
By Karl Rove
C
ongressional Republicans are
right to try to stop President
Obama’s November 2014
executive action suspending enforcement of immigration laws for
millions of illegal aliens.
The House has passed a Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill prohibiting DHS from
spending money to carry out Mr.
Obama’s unconstitutional directive
when the department’s current
funding runs out Feb. 27.
Now 60 senators—including at
least six Democrats—must vote to
invoke cloture and take up the bill.
Some Senate Democrats have expressed concern about Mr. Obama’s
action. After all, the president said
at least 22 times he could not act
without Congress passing a law.
But last week not a single Senate
Democrat supported taking it up.
The reason is that the House
bill unwisely provides cover for
Democratic senators skeptical
about Mr. Obama’s action. Some
House members insisted on adding riders to the appropriations
bill to prohibit spending on other
immigration-related decisions the
president and the DHS made in
2011 and 2012. And some of these
riders involve the department’s
legitimate statutory authority to
prioritize enforcement efforts.
Democrats can say they’re concerned about the 2014 decision,
but not these earlier ones.
Of course, there was no chance
even a narrow rider aimed at undoing Mr. Obama’s executive order
would become law after he promised to veto it. Overturning that
would require 67 senators—including at least 13 Democrats—and 290
House Members, including at least
45 Democrats.
A judge’s ruling blocking
Obama’s order should
upend the talk about a
DHS shutdown.
If no appropriation bill becomes
law, Mr. Obama will blame Republicans for refusing to fund homeland
security, calling it irresponsible
during a time of heightened terrorist threats. The media will amplify
his criticism. Already, a Feb. 12-15
CNN/ORC poll found 53% would
blame congressional Republicans
for a shutdown while only 30%
would blame Mr. Obama. Those
numbers would only get worse for
the GOP if the DHS shuts down.
Though Senate Democrats are
blocking the measure, its failure to
move will increase tensions between House and Senate Republicans. Already, some House Republicans are demanding the Senate
scrap its 60-vote requirement to
take up bills, a rule that has been
in place for nearly a century.
Shutdown advocates will claim
anyone who disagrees with them
supports the president’s action.
This charge is false, as it was during the October 2013 governmentwide shutdown over defunding
ObamaCare. The argument has
always been about the prudence of
tactics, not about goals, which
nearly every Republican agrees on.
In the next few weeks, some
members of the House shutdown
caucus may try forcing a no-confidence vote on Speaker John Boehner. Ironically, they would be using
the refusal of Senate Democrats to
back a House GOP bill to demand
House Republicans replace their
leader.
A DHS shutdown would also
damage Republican chances to win
the White House in 2016. We’ve
seen this movie. After the 2012
election, Gallup found 43% of
Americans viewed the GOP favorably while 50% did not. After the
October 2013 government shutdown, 32% were favorable toward
the GOP while 61% were not. It
took hard work and lucky breaks
for Republicans to get those numbers back to 42% favorable, 52%
unfavorable by the 2014 election.
Republicans did well in the 2014
midterms despite the 2013 shutdown, not because of it. Not a single new Republican senator campaigned on having voted for or
supported it.
The good news for Republicans
is that Monday’s preliminary in-
junction by federal district Judge
Andrew Hanen, which stopped
implementation of Mr. Obama’s
November immigration executive
order, gives the GOP an opportunity to extract itself. Republicans
can now offer a rider that refuses
funds for executing Mr. Obama’s
directive that is under court challenge, dropping the other add-ons
the shutdown caucus insisted on.
This would remove the excuse of
Senate Democrats skeptical of Mr.
Obama’s directive. Either they act
on their concerns or go on record
supporting the president’s unconstitutional action.
For Republicans, this would be
a chance to make their point on
an issue where voters agree the
president overstepped his authority. It would also give momentum
to the legal challenge by indicating there is bipartisan support for
reversing it.
The GOP’s ability to block Mr.
Obama’s overreach now depends
on the success of the court challenge mounted by 26 state attorneys general. And if they fail, on
putting a Republican in the Oval
Office. What Republicans know is
that shutting down the Department of Homeland Security helps
neither cause.
Multiple Launch Rocket
Systems would get
Putin’s attention.
The Russians have recently introduced artillery-locating radars
linked to long-range artillery
units. These “artillery strike complexes” identify Ukrainian artillery firing positions and return
fire in overwhelming barrages.
Pro-Russian infantry forces follow
each barrage with a quick ground
assault, pushing the Ukrainians
steadily away from the occupied
zones. The Ukrainian army has no
means of countering this.
The only possible solution to
this new Russian assault is to
counter it with standoff attacks
from outside the battle zone using
U.S.- and NATO-supplied longrange weapons. The U.S. Army has
several battalions of Multiple
Launch Rocket Systems on hand,
which have much greater range
and accuracy than the unguided
“Grad” rocket launchers Kiev has
now. Simply put, an MLRS launcher
is a large rectangular box containing 12 long-range rockets sitting
atop a tank-like vehicle. The
rocket launcher can be moved
quickly about the battlefield and
fired in seconds, making it difficult to locate and strike. Each
rocket can range over 40 miles
and has a precision warhead that
is capable of hitting point targets,
like tanks and artillery pieces.
Russian targets are mostly
static. They consist of commandand-control facilities and armored
vehicles positioned in bunkered
fighting positions in and around
the contested cities of Donetsk and
Lugansk. MLRS would be able to
destroy Russian targets methodically, one at a time. Such a campaign could slowly eliminate
Russian static targets and force the
fight to devolve into a dismounted
infantry campaign, a campaign the
Ukrainian army can win.
Training the Ukrainians to operate the MLRS would take time.
But the system is relatively simple
to employ and shoot. The fire control is automated, using on-board
computers and navigation systems. The rockets are loaded in
sealed “pods” that can be easily
stored, transported and loaded.
Recall that it was massed batteries of MLRS—the Iraqis called
their barrages “steel rain”—that
were principally responsible for
By Ron Lieber
(Harper, 240 pages, $26.99)
K
ids ask questions. Lots of them. While you would
think that questions about money would be easier
to answer than “How did that baby get in your
tummy?,” for many of us they aren’t. “People are not
dispassionate about money, and they’re certainly not
calm and rational about their kids,” notes New York
Times personal finance columnist Ron Lieber. In “The
Opposite of Spoiled,” he shows how badly we mangle the
combination, and in the course of profiling dozens of
savvy families, he gives tips on how to talk about money
with kids in a calm way.
The somewhat strange title stems from an observation: “When you ask parents to name the worst single
word that anyone
could use to describe their children, a surprising
number of them
answer right away
with the word
‘spoiled.’ ” Yet there
are worse things
kids could be: cruel,
violent, disrespectful. But the well-todo readers that Mr.
Lieber (correctly) assumes he is addressing—and he counts his
Brooklyn-dwelling,
two-income family
among them—are particularly opposed to entitled children. “The word ‘spoiled’
has no useful antonym,” he writes. But
whatever comes close—contented? grateful?—we all
want our kids to be that.
Yet it’s also just short-sighted to be over-the-top
stingy with your children (and their friends) if you do
have extra resources. “Affluent parents with more
money than they need to live on will, by definition, be
setting artificial limits with their children almost every
day,” Mr. Lieber observes. Those of us who happily
spring for $50 lift tickets for multiple offspring have no
concrete reason to nix the in-app purchases that delight
our tech-savvy kids. And yet I find myself trying (and often failing) to make that distinction. The temptation for
all of us is to give in, or set mushy rules that invite
whining, or bark “because I said so” and tell ourselves
that we’re sheltering our children from fiscal realities.
Mr. Lieber makes a convincing case that this tendency
to avoid the topic is a missed opportunity. Children may
well need more financial education today than in the past.
Social media are an “engine of envy” that teases them
with idealized versions of others’ lives, and television
makes the Kardashians seem like a peer group. “I have
lost count,” Mr. Lieber writes, “of the number of disgusted
parents who have complained to me about their kids following Michael Dell’s kids on Instagram or others who
were posting photos of themselves on private jets.”
If you’re reading this book (or this review),
the correct answer to that most awkward
of questions—‘Are we rich?’—is ‘yes.’
paralyzing and then obliterating
Saddam’s artillery during Desert
Storm in 1991. MLRS are also found
in the arsenals of several NATO
allies. Perhaps a collective aid
program that donates the system
to Kiev from many sources would
send the signal to Mr. Putin that he
faces a coalition rather than a
single state.
Would just one weapons system be decisive? Probably not. But
it seems unlikely that Mr. Putin
could stand significant losses in
his precious armored forces for
long. Given Russia’s flagging economy, it is unlikely that he would
throw the dice and escalate the
conflict with a full-scale invasion
of western Ukraine. A more likely
outcome would be a realization by
the Russians that a bloody standoff wouldn’t be in their best interests. At that point a real cease-fire
might become more attractive.
No material support of the
Ukrainian military will work unless the U.S. and NATO begin to
send the right weapons and training cadres now. Delay means defeat, should the fighting break out
in earnest. But immediate action
using the best options available at
this late date might well preserve
the sovereignty of a friendly state
and turn back a tyrant who
threatens Europe.
Maj. Gen. Scales retired from
active duty in 2000 as commandant of the Army War College.
Ms. Vanderkam is the author of “All the Money in the
World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting
and Spending.”
Mr. Rove, a former deputy chief
of staff to President George W.
Bush, helped organize the political-action committee American
Crossroads.
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W
ith the fragile cease-fire
brokered last week in
Minsk, Belarus, already
appearing to crumble, President
Obama should begin sending
Ukraine the “lethal defensive
weapons” it needs—and desperately wants—to defend itself from
further incursions by Russian
troops and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
If Washington began supplying
Kiev with the latest weapons technologies now, it might deter
future Russian aggression, and
perhaps even dull President Vladimir Putin’s apparent ambition to
annex much, if not all, of eastern
Ukraine. Half-measures, however,
could make matters worse. A few
U.S. arms in the hands of the
Ukrainian army might give Mr.
Putin the excuse he needs to
broaden and intensify his campaign.
What to do?
Some alternatives are already
off the table. Supplying aircraft to
the Ukrainian air force won’t work
because the Russians have mobilized sophisticated missile systems along Russia’s western border, effectively walling off Ukraine
from aerial intervention. Sending
U.S. or NATO heavy-fighting gear
like tanks and armored vehicles
directly into the contested zones
probably won’t work either because the Russians have crowded
their conquered space with a
vastly superior arsenal of tanks
and antitank missiles.
Sending small arms, ammunition and antitank ordnance to the
Ukrainians will certainly help. But
at this stage in the fighting the
Russians and their rebel allies
possess a level of materiel “overmatch” that cannot be overcome
with light infantry weapons alone.
The Opposite of Spoiled
Children also face ever higher college costs, and they
make life-altering decisions about student loans at age 17.
“There is really only one word for this state of affairs,”
Mr. Lieber writes: “lunacy.” Add that “health insurance
and retirement savings are now mostly the responsibility
of workers and not employers,” not to mention our unfortunate inclination to fall back on stereotypes with
emotionally charged issues (parents tend to talk about
investing with boys, not girls), and you have a recipe for
confused and financially illiterate children.
“The Opposite of Spoiled” offers advice on “how not
to lie while also satisfying the insatiable desire for information.” The advice isn’t earth-shattering. Personal finance is a well-worn topic, as is parenting. But Mr. Lieber does have some useful tips: Buy yourself time by
following up awkward questions (“What do you earn?”)
with, “Why do you ask?” He also notes that you may
have to set up your own “bank” if you want young kids
to understand the miracle of compound interest. With
regular banks offering less than 1% interest and charging
steep fees for low balances, the financial industry isn’t
going to help teach the lesson you intend to teach.
Mr. Lieber describes his own Spend/Save/Give system
for allowance distribution, with the first category being
“kind of a mad science experiment” in his family. Children, including his daughter, “often want random junk,
but this is part of the process of letting them practice.
After all, how can we teach them to control their impulses until we observe them under real world conditions with actual green cash?” One of the families he interviews introduces a useful metric that can help kids
weigh value: hours of fun per dollar. A bike might score
high; most cheap plastic flotsam does not.
The author is at his best when he is scrutinizing popular tropes. Teens going on volunteer trips to developing
countries comes in for harsh criticism. He quotes 21year-old Pippa Biddle, a veteran of such trips, saying
that “we, a group of highly educated private boarding
school students, were so bad at the most basic construction work that each night, the men had to take down the
structurally unsound bricks we had laid and rebuild the
structure so that, when we woke up in the morning, we
would be unaware of our failure.” Better to send the
money instead.
Of course, all this advice assumes privilege, which Mr.
Lieber fully acknowledges. If you’re reading this book
(or this review), the correct answer to that most awkward question—“Are we rich?”—is “yes.” That is sometimes hard to acknowledge, but parenting isn’t easy. Mr.
Lieber quotes a clinical psychologist saying: “The hidden
message of offering the truth to children is the message
that you and your children can work together to manage
difficult issues.” To paraphrase: Suck it up.
After reading this book, I’m trying to do that. The other
night, my husband read our mortgage statement to our 7year-old and told him what we owed. Normally, I might
have tried to change the subject, but instead I just nodded. Why shouldn’t he know? If he Googles our address,
Zillow will tell him what we paid for our house anyway. In
this version, we get to discuss the concept of borrowing
and why we live where we live. “Every conversation about
money is also about values,” writes Mr. Lieber. It’s better
to have more of these conversations than fewer.
The Firepower That Ukraine Needs
By Robert H. Scales
The Problem
Of Privilege
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