Political Predictions: Obama’s Second Term

With the reelection of President Obama, we may venture to make a few predictions about the near-term future. Of course, the president is only one element in a political system whose partisan makeup has changed little in this latest Election That Matters. The House remains in Republican hands and the Senate remains Democratic. Republicans have picked up a few governorships, but a number of ballot initiatives popular with Democrats — the legalization of so-called same-sex marriage in Maine and Maryland, for instance — passed. If this election is any indication, Americans in the aggregate are content with the status quo (which, as the late cartoonist Jeff MacNelly once quipped, is “Latin for ‘the mess we’re in’”).

What are we to expect from a second Obama term? Simply put, more of the same, but with tax hikes. In his first term in office, President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress have shown themselves to be shrewd pragmatists, continuing all of the important planks in the bipartisan program that has propelled America toward receivership and post-constitutional rule for several generations. And these planks were espoused with equal enthusiasm by candidate Mitt Romney, as they have been by every Republican candidate and president from Thomas Dewey onward. Pared down to their essence, these planks amount to three realms of orthodoxy that the leadership of neither party is permitted to question. These realms are foreign policy, financial policy, and the expansion of federal government power at the expense of state and local government and individual freedom of choice.

No Change There

U.S. foreign policy has changed little since the end of World War I, except that the U.S. Congress, in defiance of President Woodrow Wilson and the establishment, refused, in the wake of that ruinous conflict, to authorize entry into the League of Nations, an organization that was perceived correctly as a precursor to world government that would require the United States to give up a large amount of sovereignty. But with U.S. entry into the United Nations, which replaced the League of Nations at the end of World War II, the die was cast. And from that day to this, no U.S. president — and precious few even in Congress — has challenged U.S. membership in the UN. With recent presidencies, starting with George H. W. Bush, who sought authorization for the Gulf War from the UN Security Council, the United States has come to defer more and more to UN authority on matters of war and peace. President Obama has certainly been no exception, waging war on Libya only upon securing UN authorization for limited hostilities, and refraining from intervening in Syria for want of a Security Council mandate. The rightness or wrongness of such interventionist activities aside, the point is that the U.S. government, for all practical purposes, has ceded its authority over war and peace to an unelected international body.

It is worth noting that the modern state of Israel was effectively created by a UN General Assembly resolution in November 1947. Should war break out with Iran over the alleged “existential threat” that the Persian state poses to Israel, expect the United States to jump in as the leading member of the global community’s enforcement arm.

For the United States to play the role of the world’s policeman under UN auspices, it has been necessary, following the precedent set with the Korean War, to abandon the constitutional requirement that Congress — not the president, much less an international authority like the UN — has sole authority to declare war on behalf of the United States. No U.S. war since the creation of the United Nations has been fought under a congressional declaration, a circumstance neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney has ever expressed any intention of rectifying.

During their three debates, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama sparred spiritedly over foreign policy issues ranging from Israel and Iran to trade with China. But, as most Americans perceived, there were no differences of substance. Both men favored the decades-old program of military interventionism and membership in the United Nations and affiliated internationalist organizations like NATO. Neither uttered so much as a whisper about restoring the congressional authority to declare war, since both appear to believe that war has become the sole prerogative of the U.S. president, with the advice and consent of the United Nations. While President Obama is perceived to be less bellicose than Romney and his predecessor George W. Bush — he did, to his credit, denounce rather forcefully in the debates any rush to military involvement in Syria or Iran — make no mistake about it: If his superiors at the UN Security Council or among America’s foreign policy elites at the Council on Foreign Relations and other private, non-elected policymaking bodies require him to, he will not hesitate to embark on more feckless and expensive overseas military adventures, no matter what American public opinion has to say about it.

And within hours of Romney’s concession speech, European leaders announced a push for new involvement in Syria, including the possible deployment of Patriot missile batteries to enforce a no-fly zone over a NATO-declared safe haven for the Syrian rebels — measures already under discussion in secret, but which were kept from public view until the reelection of Obama. As Shashank Joshi, an analyst with London’s Royal United Services Institute, a military think tank, told the Associated Press, “With the re-election of Obama, what you have is a strong confidence on the British side that the U.S. administration will be engaged more on Syria from the get-go.”

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