Steve Chapman — one of my favorite contributors over at reason — wrote a beautifully concise editorial a few weeks ago making the case that Obama’s first year in foreign policy has brought nothing new, despite any conspicuous honors asserting the contrary. One of the most important points Chapman makes is this:

The administration and its opponents both make much of its plan to withdraw all U.S. combat forces from Iraq by this summer and to pull the rest out by 2012. What both prefer to forget is that the previous president agreed to the same timetable. Obama’s policy on the war he once opposed is not similar to Bush’s: It is identical.

You hear a lot of the president’s defenders, in the face of criticism of his Afghanistan policy, offer two major responses: 1. at least he’s ending Bush’s idiotic and quixotic Operation Iraqi Freedom, and 2. at least he’s ending Bush’s secretive and illiberal policy of detainment at Guantanamo Bay. Chapman has just dealt with defense number one. Two? Ummmmmm.

Chapman also notes that defense spending is increasing under Obama (while conservatives still harp on him for being “soft” on defense).

So what we actually have, a year into this new administration, is a total endorsement of the self-destructive imperialism which has been slowly eroding the democratic capitalist consensus since the fall of the Wall. Meanwhile, we liberal democracies — “the good guys” — build more and more Walls which justify the anger and resistance of those left on the outside. Or, perhaps more accurately, those whose lives and livelihoods are trampled in the wall’s construction.

Quickly, consider the mind-boggling nature of the way our leaders frame defense policy. They spend more on defense — and thus maintain more bases and possess more advanced weaponry — than anyone else in the world. They also donate more to Israel’s military than that of any other nation in the world. And yet they have argued, almost continuously, that the US and Israel are under threat of extermination. What they have done is they have flipped things around. They’ve emphasized the 3000 Americans killed on 9/11 and downplayed the hundreds of thousands of Arabs killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in subsequent years. They’ve emphasized the rocket attacks on Sderot and downplayed the blockade of Gaza.

Threat is what has been used to frame the worst and most illiberal of American policy, as Jesse Walker wrote about the bank bailouts early last year. Just as he’s doubled down on troops in Afghanistan, Obama has doubled down on that sense of threat and panic which engineered public acceptance of the worst excesses of George W. Bush’s reign. Let’s all calm down and realize that we are going to be okay. We have the weapons, we have the wealth, and we have the security.

But the Arab? The one who has been murdered, detained, and occupied daily, and in many cases possesses no freedom or autonomy to defend himself? He might want to hit the panic button. Or maybe he already has — and it’s our fault.

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