OPINION:
There are important lessons for the United States in the arrest in Brussels of one of the planners of the Paris massacre of last November. Salah Abdeslam was arrested in the Belgian capital’s notorious, largely Muslim quarter of Molenbeek, where he had lived openly, free of worry about arrest. This identifies a problem that the Obama administration, like it or not, must deal with.
It’s neither Islamophobia nor hostility to immigration to recognize the fact that a relatively small but significant number of Muslims are sympathetic, to a greater or lesser degree, to radical Islamic terrorism. Lethargy and foolish and naive attitudes compound this elsewhere in the West. Mayor Bill de Blasio, for one example, has stopped the New York Police Department’s intensive monitoring of mosques where radical imams preach violent jihad, endangering Jew, Christian, Muslim and unbeliever alike.
Policymakers cannot turn a blind eye to the intimidation of peaceful Muslims here and elsewhere. A growing number of Muslims in the United States and Europe acknowledge this threat. The search for Salah Abdeslam further exposed the difficulty of French and Belgian security networks to work together. This is in part due to the natural bureaucratic jealousies, aggravated by Belgium’s trilingual government and its linguistic and ethnic antagonisms.
This security lapse is further reflected in sometimes tense relations between the United States and Britain despite the special relationship developed over more than two centuries, based on history, language and common religious and political institutions. President Obama came to office with a British chip on his shoulder, jealous and skeptical of the relationship. Whether as part of his strategy of withdrawing from the world, or a personal anti-colonial bias inherited from his Kenyan father, is largely irrelevant. Shared values and intelligence networks are not only necessary, but indispensable.
Mr. Obama’s churlish sniping at the British continues. In a recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, setting out his philosophy and strategy, Mr. Obama could not resist saying that Prime Minister David Cameron created the chaos and danger in Libya because he was “distracted by a range of other things.” This is of a piece with his vow to “lead from behind,” which has left the United States leaderless and behind in the Middle East where American leadership is sorely needed. Policy misjudgments by the White House, and by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of State, emerge almost daily.
Mr. Obama’s fanciful criticism of the leadership of Winston Churchill, who held the West together in the early days of World War II, threaten to further damage the special relationship at a time when Britain is considering whether to remain a member of the European Union on renegotiated terms, or stay to suffer loss of sovereignty on critical issues such as immigration. Britain and Mr. Cameron deserve better from a long-trusted ally. The new president, whoever he or she may be, must move early in 2017 to repair Mr. Obama’s damage and strengthen the ancient tie between the two countries, the bedrock of the English-speaking peoples who have guarded civilization over the many decades. The special relationship is needed more than ever in an increasingly interconnected and unstable world.
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