The Magician
In a re-election year, the U.S. president is making the world and all its troubles . . . vanish.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
March 14, 2012, 7:28 p.m. ET
Don't get too distracted by the Republicans' road-tour version of the 2012 presidential election as it hits theaters in the likes of Mississippi, Alabama, Hawaii and Illinois. The best show in town still plays daily at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If maestro Barack Obama wins re-election this fall, we will have watched one of the greatest magic acts in American history.
The new Obama magic show debuted in the State of the Union speech. Standing before Congress, Mr. Obama brought forth "An Economy Built to Last." Not the real one we have now, but the one he's going to conjure after he's re-elected.
The way this works is the president breaks economic history into two parts. In his right hand are the awful policy mistakes someone else made before January 2009. In his left hand is the economy he'll bring to life after November. In between is nothing. You think you're looking at the Obama years from 2009 to 2012—8% unemployment, low growth, low investment—when whoa, it's gone! Never happened.
The best was yet to come. The president of the United States is making the world itself and all its troubles . . . vanish.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea—one by one, Mr. Obama and his lovely assistants have methodically taken them all off the table. If he can make the world's problems seem to go away until he gets re-elected, it will constitute his presidency's greatest illusion.
Iraq went away in October, when Mr. Obama announced that all U.S. troops would be out of there by year's end. Not most of them; all of them. This would be the first major war theater in modern times that the U.S. departed without leaving behind any presence. The argument in defense of this total troop wipeout is that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demanded the U.S. waive prosecution immunity for any of our forces still there. The counter-argument is that the U.S. lost all leverage with Iraq's government because of Mr. Obama's passivity toward the place and its problems. Iraq fell to next to nothing. Remarkable.
In December 2009, Mr. Obama announced that the U.S. would surge 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. In the real world this is known as a commitment. The strategy was succeeding in strategically important Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the South. Then this past June, Mr. Obama announced he would pull these troops out of Afghanistan by this summer, likely in time for his August renomination speech in Charlotte. The U.S.'s Afghan commitment has been polling poorly.
This of course doesn't mean the Afghan Taliban will disappear. The magic stops at the water's edge. The Taliban's plans to re-overthrow the Afghan government in Kabul will go forward. But Afghanistan as an issue is sliding off the table.
One year ago, Syria's Bashar al-Assad began to methodically kill anyone publicly opposed to his rule. Like the criminal warlord Keyser Söze in "The Usual Suspects," Assad is killing them, their wives, their children, their relatives, demolishing their homes and razing their towns. The world wants to help.
Evoking the Libyan intervention, the Obama administration says we can't help, because we don't have a U.N. Security Council resolution. Russia and China won't let that happen. Our hands are tied. Syria is off the table.
Amid informed fears that Iran's nuclear program is moving close to weapons-producing capability and a pre-emptive strike by Israel, President Obama gave a hawkish speech on Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, told a reporter "I don't bluff," and met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Watching from the pundit gallery, writer Vali Nasr concluded on Bloomberg News: "Last week, President Barack Obama skillfully shifted the debate on Iran, pushing back against 'idle talk of war' and making the case for diplomacy." The centrifuges are still spinning, but Iran is off the table.
Earlier this month, North Korea, the ever-volatile nuclear power, said it would suspend its uranium-enrichment program and missile tests in return for the Obama administration's decision to deliver 240,000 metric tons of food aid. China's government praised the food package as a prelude to resuming the stalled six-party talks.
Specialists noted that this was the first time the U.S. has ever linked humanitarian assistance to inducing North Korean participation in talks. No matter. This should take North Korea off the table until November.
It's an amazing feat. At home and overseas, Barack Obama has just erased three years of rough spots from the hard disc of politics. It will be more remarkable still if the Republicans, amid a war-weary public, go along with the illusion. The world, alas, may not. For America's onlooking competitors and adversaries in Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang and Waziristan, a U.S. president's magic act is for them a very real opportunity.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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