Are There Any Other Allies I Can Alienate? Asking For A Friend

By Barack Obama

In the space of less than a year, my administration has successfully shaken longstanding commitments to the security and integrity of three US allies in the Middle East: Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Does anyone know if there are other such allies I can alienate in the eleven months I have left in office? Asking for a friend.

It’s sort of amazing how quickly things can turn around like that. In pursuit of a détente with Iran, it’s possible to reverse decades of cooperation and shared interests with multiple countries, while enabling an explicitly genocidal, racist, homophobic, repressive dictatorial theocratic regime to establish itself as the leading player in the region. It’s a radical transformation to occur in so short a time, so I’m sort of wondering if the feat can be repeated elsewhere in the world. You know, hypothetically.

China looks like a good candidate for a realignment of that nature. They’ve long sought to reclaim Taiwan, and their ally North Korea perpetually threatens both South Korea – like Taiwan, a longstanding US ally – and Japan. A reinterpretation of American security and economic priorities in East Asia would make the whole Iran nuclear deal and its empowerment of radical anti-Western forces in the Islamic Republic look like child’s play. Would that take nearly as long as the process did in the Middle East? How would it be accomplished? Theoretically, I mean.

NATO in general is also ripe for such a thing. Having all but abandoned alliance member Turkey to face Putin’s Russia, it won’t take much more to bring the rest of NATO to its knees. Ukraine folded pretty convincingly over Crimea. We would just need – and by “we” I mean whoever might be considering such a course of action, just as mental exercise, of course – to gradually erode the deterrent capabilities of the alliance, both among the likely targets of future Russian ambitions, such as Poland and the Baltic states, and among the Western European nations who would share the burden of sending troops to fight Russian advances. Just thinking out loud here.

Ultimately, this thought experiment involves envisioning the ways in which American power can be undermined from within, for example by having a president who specifically seeks that as an outcome of his two terms, and determining the precise steps such a person would take to achieve that result. Those steps would obviously have to include suppression or spin of many such measures to forestall domestic opposition to the moves, in addition to framing the objections of the allies who oppose those moves as attempts to meddle in US foreign policy or governmental affairs.

You know, just to tickle the intellect.