Fighting The Blob: The Political Rewards of Defying The Foreign Policy Consensus From Barack Obama to Jeremy Corbyn
Nearly ten years ago, the Democratic candidates for President took the primary debate stage for the first time in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Over the course of an hour and a half, they were posed questions on a variety of topics, including foreign policy. At one point, they were asked whether or not they would meet with dictators abroad, such as Fidel Castro or Kim Jong-Il, without any preconditions, in order to pursue diplomatic solutions to ongoing problems. Barack Obama, alone among the major contenders, answered that yes, he would. In the aftermath of the debate Obama’s performance was universally panned by the punditocracy. In particular, they opined that he came off as too weak on foreign policy, both because of that answer and another one where he said that his first response to a terror attack would be to focus on emergency services rather than retaliation. If Obama wanted to be seen as “presidential material,” he would have to reverse course and be “tougher” on terrorism and foreign dictators. This conventional wisdom would be repeated throughout the primary and general elections in 2008, and yet Obama persisted. His defiance of the foreign policy establishment’s conventional views on how a “plausible president” talks and acts would not harm him politically either in his 2008 campaign, or when he defied them in office with his pursuit of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. Nine years later, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn would go even further and defy what conventional wisdom said he should do in the face of the terror attacks that happened during this year’s general election campaign. The lesson of Obama and Corbyn is that foreign policy media establishment’s conventional wisdom does not hold the sway over the public that they think it does.
In 2016, Washington media circles were abuzz over a controversial interview with Ben Rhodes, one of Barack Obama’s closest foreign policy advisers during his Presidency. In a New York Times profile, Rhodes coined the term “The Blob” to refer to the amassed voices of op-ed writers, television talking heads, and pundits that generally reinforce a pro-foreign intervention conventional wisdom among the Washington establishment. As Rhodes and Obama’s foreign policy team worked towards the Iranian nuclear deal, these voices in both parties formed a chorus in opposition. On the so-called liberal side, author, attorney and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz (a lifelong Democrat) wrote that the deal was “extremely dangerous.”[1] At the same time, leading right-wing intellectual William Kristol said that the deal “gives the Iranian regime $140 billion in exchange for…effectively nothing.”[2] These are just two examples of an echo chamber described by Rhodes as encompassing “editors and reporters at the New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq War and then tried to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when things turned sour.”[3] The effect of having people on both sides of the political spectrum spouting this belief is the creation of a media echo chamber that tries to tell politicians that there is no alternative other than to endorse a more aggressive foreign policy, and that any leader who goes against this wisdom would be dooming both themselves and the country.
The Iran deal is only two years old, and if the Trump administration does not dismantle it, we will have to wait for history to deliver its verdict on whether or not it was wise foreign policy. However, in terms of political consequences, there were none for Barack Obama, in fact the opposite. The Iran deal was just one aspect of Obama’s defiant posture in the last two years of his presidency, his self-described ‘fourth quarter.’ He fought against lame duck status with everything he had, pushing as progressive a policy as he could domestically through the use of executive orders and defying the hawkish conventional wisdom on foreign policy through the Iran deal and also through opening up U.S. relations with Cuba, which flew in the face of the old chestnut that ‘only Nixon can go to China,’ ie that it is politically impossible for a Democratic President to adopt a friendlier pose towards previously hostile countries and that only a conservative can do it. This phase of his Presidency saw his approval ratings recover from the miserable forty percent they had been before the 2014 midterms to nearly sixty percent by the time he left office. Does anyone doubt that if he had run for a third term against Donald Trump instead of his more hawkish former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (whom Rhodes explicitly calls part of The Blob), we would have had a different result in 2016? Obama began and ended his national political career proving that The Blob is a paper tiger and their supposed ability to take down a politician defying their consensus is an illusion.
Even further proof of this came in the 2017 general election in the United Kingdom. In the wake of the terrorist attack in Manchester, Britain’s own version of The Blob preached that Jeremy Corbyn, a noted pacifist accused of sympathizing with terrorist groups such as the IRA and Hamas (much in the way that American conservatives tried to tie Obama to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers), would be doomed if the election hinged on national security issues. Undaunted, Corbyn stood his ground; rather than accepting the right-wing framing of the national security and demands that he not “politicize” the tragedy, he hit back at Theresa May and the Conservatives on two fronts. First, he pointed out that attacks such as these were an unintended consequence of Britain’s own foreign policy, seeing as the Manchester bomber had belonged to a Libyan militia group that received funding from the British government in its campaign against Muammar Qaddhafi. Second, he ripped May for the hypocrisy of attacking him for being weak on security when it had been she who had drastically cut funding for police, including counter-terrorism, in her previous position as Home Secretary (a position roughly equivalent to America’s Secretary of Homeland Security). To the shock of the British media class and even many of Corbyn’s own supporters, his polling numbers (which had already begun climbing before Manchester) only got better and better, and on Election Day he vastly exceeded expectations, winning thirty additional seats for Labour and breaking the Conservative majority in Parliament.
The lesson that progressives and the left should take from this recent history is that actual voters do not ascribe to The Blob’s enforced “wisdom” on national security. What voters actually respect is strength and principled stands on the issues, even if the media tries to create an echo chamber that makes such positions seem unpopular and doomed to fail. Barack Obama and Jeremy Corbyn are incredibly different politicians, but they both proved that the political narrative advanced by the Bill Kristols and Alan Dershowitzes of this country and their British cousins is (to quote a certain other British writer) a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.
[1] Alan Dershowitz “The Case Against The Iran Deal,” Newsweek, August 8th, 2015, http://www.newsweek.com/dershowitz-case-against-iran-deal-360911
[2] William Kristol “A Very Good Deal- for Iran,” The Weekly Standard, July 14th, 2015, http://www.weeklystandard.com/a-very-good-dealfor-iran/article/990662
[3] David Samuels “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru,” New York Times, May 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html?_r=0
