Obama’s One Idea Is Wrong

Disraeli said of a character in his novel Sybil: “He had only one idea, and that was wrong.” The same sometimes seems to hold for President Obama’s foreign policy. The one idea is to pander, and it was on display again in his recent trip to Asia.

In India, he proposed to add that country to the roster of permanent, veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council.

India is a potential economic powerhouse, an exemplar of democracy in the developing world, and a country that shares our bitter experience of jihadist terrorism. Continuing to strengthen the alliance with India, as Obama’s predecessors did, is all to the good. But the last way we should want to do that is within the UN.

First, the UN is an utter failure, and a principal reason is gridlock. The organization’s original purpose was to keep the peace, and that authority was vested in the Security Council. But largely due to having five states with veto power, that body has been mostly paralyzed. Increase the number of vetoes, and the paralysis will worsen. Needless to say, there would be no way to stop at six. Add a second Asian permanent member to the four Europeans without adding any African or Latin American? I don’t think so. In reality we are talking of an expansion not to six with vetoes, but to eight or ten or twelve.

Second, India may be an ally of the United States in many ways, but not in the UN. There, it acts more like an enemy. India is among the most active leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, which has done about as much to poison the UN and leave it incapable of fulfilling even a fraction of its noble purposes as the Soviet bloc did.

Further, largely due to its “non-aligned” leadership, India’s voting record in the UN is antithetical to ours, probably more so than that of any other democracy. In 2006, for example, according to the State Department’s annual report on UN voting, India voted with the US in the General Assembly only 16 percent of the time. On votes that the US deemed “important,” India voted with us ZERO times. This has improved over the past three years, perhaps because relations have grown warmer. Last year, India voted with us 30 percent in total, and a whopping 11 percent on “important” votes. Do we really want to bring this country into the Security Council with a veto?

Third, India’s archenemy, Pakistan, and India’s archrival, China, were both immediately and predictably up in arms in the wake of this news. Japan rarely makes noise, but this surely also went down badly in Tokyo, which pays the second largest share of the UN’s budget (after the US). And then there are Brazil, Germany, Nigeria, and several other states that have aired quite plausible claims for permanent seats on any expanded Security Council that Obama has not endorsed. The Obama administration has already acted to smooth the feathers of the offended states by undertaking new panders in their directions. But this is something like a Ponzi scheme. Indeed, by some accounts, Obama felt compelled to stroke Indian egos in this manner because he had offended the Indians in a previous round of stroking the Pakistanis.

No doubt, Obama knows that the Security Council is not about to be expanded, so why not make the Indians feel good by writing them a rubber check? The answer is that the world is interconnected. In Asia, for example, Japan worries about China which worries about India which worries about Pakistan which worries about Afghanistan which worries about Iran which threatens Iraq which threatens Jordan. And the cycle of states that fear or threaten or rival their neighbors goes on ad infinitum.

Of course the US has interests or issues with all of these states, and cannot be inhibited from pursuing them for fear of offending others. But to pander is to give something away gratuitously, thus incurring the wrath of the recipient’s rivals needlessly. Worse still, the recipient is likely to discover the hollowness of the gift and thus to end up feeling resentment rather than gratitude.

Obama’s one idea is wrong; it’s time to try a new one.