What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (41 page)

If only Obama were, in the words of Ahmadinejad, an “amateur” and “inexperienced.” His pattern of helping our worst enemies and dissing our allies suggests far more dangerous and sinister motives. His policies reflected his view that American power is a problem in the world, not a solution. He has sought to reduce it at every turn, from signing bad treaties with Russia that severely constrain our ability to defend ourselves to disclosing the particulars of our nuclear weapons to banning the development of new nuclear weapons. American power is something to be limited and ultimately reduced to inconsequentiality. And American retreat is to be carried out with all deliberate speed.

On a frigid day in mid-February 2010, a quiet, unassuming man slipped into the White House. Wearing simple robes and slippers, hands clasped before him, he humbly prepared to meet the Leader of the Free World. He was supposed to have had this meeting months before but was told at the time that Obama had a scheduling conflict. With that dis, Obama became the first president since 1991 to ice the Dalai Lama.

Obama sacrificed His Holiness—a gentle, spiritual man who has done nothing but peacefully champion the rights of the Tibetan people held under the jackboot of the Chinese communists—because Obama wanted to schmooze the Chinese to keep buying our debt to float his record deficit spending and to get them to cooperate on tougher sanctions on Iran. Obama refused to share a cup of tea with the Dalai Lama, at least until he had the chance to meet with the Chinese first.

This was a major reversal for Obama who, during the 2008 campaign, called on Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics over the violent Chinese suppression of peaceful demonstrations in Tibet. Bush, by the way, gave the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007. When Obama blew off His Holiness, there wasn’t a peep of protest from human rights groups, leftists who say they fight for human rights, or Richard Gere.

After His Holiness finally did get his meeting with Obama, he was escorted out a side door of the White House, past towering piles of smelly garbage. As he walked by the filth, Joe Biden emerged from the trash heap and said, “Hey, Mr. Lama! I loved it when you were reincarnated as Brad Pitt in
Seven Years in Tibet
.” The Chinese commies must have gotten a hearty chuckle at the sight of their nemesis negotiating his way past bags of empty pizza boxes, used paper towels, and what looked like an old bedspread.

The Russians saw Obama’s anti-Americanism when he caved on the European missile defense shield, the Iranians saw it when he kept throwing olive branches at them, and the rest of the world saw it when they got repeated apologies for American power and action. The message they all got was that this president could be rolled with his own anti-Americanism and that sometimes he’ll even preemptively surrender, as he did with the Dalai Lama.

In mid-April 2010, Obama attended the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC. As he approached Hu Jintao, the Chinese president and the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, he did the Obama Move. He bowed. The bow to Hu came after a string of previous Obama bows: to the Saudi king, the Japanese emperor, and (my favorite) the mayor of Tampa, Florida. Other lesser-known bows included to Stevie Wonder, Andrea Bocelli, Big Bird, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and King Friday XIII from
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
. I guess Obama has a thing for bowing to questionable dignitaries and puppets. He bows so much, Barry should just walk around life in a constant bow. Could you imagine him delivering a State of the Union address bent forward, ass in the air? For his grand finale, he could turn around and once again lead from behind.

Hu looked completely baffled and slightly amused at the sight of the president of the United States and supposed champion of freedom bowing before him. Of course, he read it as American impotence while Obama thought he was signaling a new humility that would quickly translate into cooperation.

Not so fast. The Chinese proceeded to join the Russians in opposing every major attempt we and the Europeans made at the United Nations to sanction Iran over its nuclear program. Without fanfare, Hu blew Obama off. In fact, before the Chinese leader left Washington, a reporter asked him what he had told Obama regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Jintao turned slowly to the journalist and answered, “I said, ‘Mr. President: F@&% HU!’”

In the spring of 1993, I traveled with my then boss, President Nixon, to China. Seeing Asia for the first time with the man who had changed the face of that region—and indeed the world—was extraordinary. As we took a boat ride around the outskirts of Shanghai, Nixon gazed with astonishment at the hundreds of high-rises and endless construction projects. He gestured toward the Chinese landscape of ambition and said, “None of this would have been possible without our opening in 1972.”

Over the past few decades, China has gone from being an important but secondary concern for the United States to being an important and primary one. When Nixon made his triumphant touchdown in Beijing in 1972, there was only one thing that brought the United States and China together: the growing strategic power of the Soviet Union and its threat to the global balance of power.

Today, the relationship is much more complex and nuanced. China’s stunningly rapid economic rise and its growing military assertiveness have made it more of a competitor than a strategic partner. There is a debate raging within China between those who argue for a “peaceful rise” and those who believe China should lay claim to superpower status and directly challenge the United States. As the two sides battle it out in China, they are united on one goal: to surpass America as the number one economy in the world. In mid-2011, the International Monetary Fund asserted that China will accomplish that by 2016. As the communists’ version of managed capitalism spurs China’s rise, Beijing believes that America is in irreversible decline thanks to its extreme debt and profligate ways. Every time top Chinese officials have met with Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Treasury Secretary Geithner, or other U.S. officials, they have never missed an opportunity to scold them over our spending and debt levels and the dangers of inflation. And they’re right.

The Chinese are hardly angels, however. They keep their currency undervalued, which has sent the U.S. trade deficit with China skyrocketing and hurt American jobs. China also doles out subsidies to state industries and encourages the theft of intellectual property, both of which also give Chinese goods hugely unfair advantages.

Whenever Obama, Clinton, or Geithner complains about these economic maneuvers, Hu listens politely, makes a note to discuss them with his politburo, and then heads back to Beijing to continue business as usual. Economic tricks and shady moves have produced explosive economic growth. The Chinese aren’t about to abandon them just because Obama flashes his toothy grin, Hillary promises a schmoozefest with Bill, or Geithner offers a free tax-avoidance tutorial.

For the Chinese, one of their major concerns is the value of their holdings of U.S. assets. Our largest foreign creditor, they hold over $1 trillion of our debt. If they were to stop buying our debt or sold off significant amounts of it, we’d be screwed. They’re worried about potential losses from a rapid sell-off in Treasuries, so they’ve been looking for Team Obama to reassure them that U.S. debt remains safe. The Chinese received lip service from the administration about the security of our debt, even as they’ve watched Obama pile on over $5 trillion more of it.

As they worry about the safety of their U.S. assets, the Chinese also know that holding so much of our debt gives them enormous leverage over us. As one high-ranking Chinese military official put it in late 2010, it’s about “economic warfare.” Our debt has gotten so astronomical that in fairly short order, the interest alone that we will be paying to Beijing will fund the entire People’s Liberation Army. So get this: we borrow money from the Chinese to finance our debt, then pay them back with interest, which they then use to fund their ever increasingly aggressive military. Never before has a major power funded the rise of its successor.

Meanwhile, as China’s economic strength has grown, so has its strategic power and willingness to flex it. China has become increasingly assertive in the South China, East China, and Yellow Seas, where the U.S. fleet operates. It has also issued claims of sovereignty over disputed areas, provoking serious conflicts, including with our close ally Japan over fish-rich islands. It has let its client state, North Korea, run wild, attacking our ally South Korea twice since 2009 in armed conflicts that resulted in the deaths of dozens of South Korean soldiers and civilians.

Furthermore, China has been engaged in a military buildup not entirely unlike the Soviet one that had Deng Xiaoping so panicked in 1972. Today, Beijing is building new aircraft carriers to dominate the Pacific as well as global waters. China has been dispatching ships to harass offshore oil and gas explorations conducted by Vietnam and the Philippines while claiming vast swaths of mineral-and resource-rich areas for itself. It is developing a new ballistic missile capability. In 2011, it tested a new stealth fighter jet. China continues to proliferate nuclear weapons, technology, and expertise to villains such as Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, and Pakistan. And it spearheads crippling cyber attacks aimed at our military and commercial interests.

At the same time, Obama set out to accelerate American decline through unilateral disarmament. From the outset, he intended to slash defense spending, even while the nation is still at war. In January 2012, he announced a major military “restructuring,” a euphemism for “evisceration.” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta looked like he was passing a gallstone when he announced Obama’s plan to slash defense spending by $489 billion over ten years, including cutting troop levels by half a million men and women, canceling about fifty major weapons programs, and bagging the five-decades-old policy of maintaining the ability to fight two wars in different theaters at once.

Obama’s defense cuts were an eager jump start on the automatic sequestration of Pentagon funding that’s set to kick in in January 2013 thanks to the super committee’s failure to agree on spending cuts. That called for the automatic reduction of the defense budget by $650 billion over ten years. Further defense cuts would leave us dangerously vulnerable. Obama went on to announce plans to cut our nuclear arsenal by 80 percent (far beyond the reductions required in New START), leaving us with fewer operational warheads than China.

Defense analysts warn that if the deeper cuts are allowed to occur, the Marine Corps will shrink to its smallest force in fifty years, the Army will be reduced to pre-9/11 levels, the Air Force will have two-thirds fewer fighters and bombers than in 1990, and the Navy may lose one or two aircraft-carrier battle groups and have its overall fleet down to pre–World War
One
levels. Missile defense plans are likely to be delayed, making our allies and us more vulnerable to the growing ballistic missile threat. And Panetta told Congress that big defense cuts would mean troop reductions, costing up to 1.5 million jobs and adding 1 percentage point to the already astronomical unemployment rate.

In the words of Panetta, “The Department of Defense will face devastating, automatic, across-the-board cuts that will tear a seam in the nation’s defense.” And yet, Obama fought hard to get
this precise outcome
.

Obama
wants
the defense cuts. He
wants
the military decimated. He
wants
us more vulnerable. After all, less money for the Pentagon means more money for his domestic projects. He only rushes to cut things vital to our survival. A hollowed-out military also fits his bigger agenda: if we can’t project power, we can’t continue to be a superpower.

Our allies in the region see the major U.S. defense
cuts
at the same time they see the Chinese
increasing
their military budget by 10 percent or more each year for the last twenty years. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and others are pacing the floorboards as they desperately seek our reassurance about continuing U.S. protection. Obama’s answer to the increased Chinese naval bullying was to send Hillary Clinton out to wave around the UN Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which so imperils U.S. sovereignty that the Senate won’t ratify it.

At an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in late 2011, Obama toughened his stance a bit, citing a “slight improvement” in the value of the Chinese yuan but claiming it wasn’t nearly enough. He also scolded China to behave more responsibly in addressing strategic and trade challenges. “Now they’ve grown up,” he said, “and so they’re going to have to help manage this process in a responsible way.”

No they don’t. In fact, the Chinese—whose culture is millennia old—took particular umbrage over Big Daddy’s use of the phrase “grown up.” “The U.S. intends to solve economic problems by exerting political pressure on China. Such a mission is hollow and ultimately doomed to failure,” the state-run
Global Times
said in an editorial that also accused the United States of “over-confidence.” They continued, “Maybe the U.S. should learn to accept the reality of a multi-polar world and change its mentality.”

The global community organizer isn’t playing well in China, where they have repeatedly told Big Daddy to take a hike. China knows that Obama is stuck between a Barack and a hard place: when Obama tried a unilateral move in response to China’s currency manipulation and slapped a steep 35 percent tariff on Chinese tires in 2009, the Chinese remained unmoved; more severe tariffs would certainly spark a devastating trade war and are therefore unlikely. The Chinese also know that multilateral moves through institutions such as the World Trade Organization are slow and also unlikely.