AMERICA’S FUTURE STRENGTH WILL NOT BE SOLELY DUE TO THE MILITARY

…A picture of America’s Military Might

 

Obama’s Iran Nuclear Press Conference was to show “Strength through Negotiations”, not military might.

The Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank, whom I am usually in sync with, said this week of President Obama’s press conference on the Iran Nuclear Weapons Agreement that the overall conference was, “…sadly, a powerful case — for American weakness”.

This time, I seriously disagree with Mr. Milbank.

From my point-of-view, the conference was a stellar example of how even though the US has the most powerful military in the world, there are many things today that confirm that kind of power is just one leg of a three-legged stool.  The other two legs are a nation’s natural resources and its modern infrastructure, along with its educated citizenry.

What I had received from the press conference was that it was just more proof that the world today is truly a shrinking global community. 

After WWII, the United States had the best and most powerful military as well as being the only nation with an atom bomb.  But the US also had the most stable economy in the world, more developed natural resources than most other industrialized countries and the government had begun to seriously invest in its middle-class plus what was to become the world’s finest national infrastructure. 

Since those days, the US has lost some of its overall #1 status, but it has continued to hold on to the military strength part of the equation.  However, due to today’s world-wide dependence on fossil fuels, the power of other countries has increased with both the development of their natural resources, their better educated populations and other nations have obtained nuclear capabilities.

To me, the reality is that the world’s political playing field actually became more level when the United States had to abandon South Vietnam, and then later, when the US was attacked in its own homeland on September 11^th, 2001. 

Up until that time, other than our own internal Civil War, the United States had been one of the few major industrial nations that had never been seriously attacked in a major confrontation on its own land.  After 9/11, America joined the other industrialized nations for being seriously attack from the outside on its own soil.

But then, the playing field became even more level, when in all its arrogance, those running this nation actually thought they could use our military strength for taking over and attempting to impose America’s form of democracy on a Middle Eastern dictatorship.

After the rest of the world saw this horrific level of bad political judgement, it became obvious to the other nations that the only remaining super-power was no longer infallible.  In only a decade after 9/11, the nation that many other nations had previously tried to emulate, was now only marginally ahead of many of the other major industrialized nations. 

The big change internally was that the US had finally become a nation that could be negotiated with on a much more equal level than in times past.

This is where I disagree with Mr. Milbank. 

What I learned from President Obama’s press conference was not “a case of America’s weakness”.  It was instead a dose of reality that the United States could no longer dictate what was right, and what was wrong, and that as a nation the US could no longer flex its military muscles and say to Iran that, “It’s our way or the highway!”

I believe that part of Milbank’s conclusion came about around the situation where the CBS reporter, Major Garrett, had asked a pointed question that seriously upset the president.

Mr. Garrett had asked the president, “As you well know, there are four Americans in Iran, three held on trumped-up charges,” Garrett said. “Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content, with all the fanfare around this deal, to leave the conscience of this nation, the strength of this nation, unaccounted for in relation to these four Americans?”

While controlling his anger, President Obama responded with, “The notion that I am content — as I celebrate — with American citizens languishing in Iranian jails?  That’s nonsense, and you should know better.” The president went on to explain that he didn’t link the American captives to nuclear talks because doing so may have made Iran think “we can get additional concessions out of using the captured Americans,” [that would have made it] “much more difficult for us to walk away from a deal.”

According to Mr. Milbank, he felt Obama was “acknowledging that the United States just doesn’t have the clout to enforce its will”.

My interpretation is that it was this president, along with his Secretary of State, that had been able to get the five other nations to join the US in the severe sanctions that eventually got Iran to the negotiation table. 

When the US alone had put its sanctions on Iran, Iran just laughed at the US and continued its nuclear weapons development in earnest.  It wasn’t until the US got enough nations together that seriously affected Iran’s economy that Iran then agreed to come to the table.

This was the real proof that the US was still a super power.  But it is no  longer the super power it was back when the United Nations was being formed, and it is no longer the country that can dictate it’s desires to any other countries they chose.

President Obama is a true pragmatist that offered his view that “it’s not the job of the president of the United States to solve every problem in the Middle East”.  He also said he couldn’t end the Syrian civil war without “buy in” from Russia and Iran. He then acknowledged that the nuclear deal might mean more money would be going to Hezbollah from Iran, but he followed that with: “Is that more important than preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?......No.”

So, no, I don’t think the president’s press conference was the big and powerful case that declared that America was weak.  America’s influence has been getting less and less, going back to when the then Soviet Union came up with their own atom bomb.  And the US’ strength has been diminishing, bit by bit, every decade since the end of the Korea War. 

But that doesn’t mean that America is weak.  As a nation, the US is today now joined by more and more democratic countries, and little by little the nations of dictatorship nations are disappearing.

Today, instead of the far-right’s way of wanting to bomb anyone that doesn’t follow America’s lead, I instead would hope that the way of the future is of international compromise and negotiation.

But for now, the word “compromise” is still a foul four-letter-word to the far-right American conservatives,

So, I guess it will be long after I have left this earth that compromise and negotiations will have a chance of being a normal way of life in this USA.

Copyright G.Ater  2015