August 1, 2014 2:27 PM

Stanford: Obama's secret diplomatic victories

From the left-- The most important Obama foreign policy wins you never heard

I get it. When foreigners challenge America, we want our President to scream bloody murder and then send in the Marines to make sure it happens. Forget about talking softly. Go straight for the big stick. By contrast, diplomacy looks weak, like some tin-pot dictator from a nothing-burger country is pushing us around. But in case anyone cares to notice, the world may be falling apart, but Barack Obama has put together a string of surprising diplomatic victories.

The extension of the negotiating window with Iran came and went with little notice. The nuclear freeze in Iran should be a big deal. Thanks to our negotiations and economic sanctions, Iran has diluted its highly enriched uranium, agreed to in-person inspections and video surveillance, and ceased work on its heavy water plutonium reactor. But this progress is less well known than some state secrets, a mystery not just to Americans at large but most political insiders as well.

Another recent—and oddly secret—diplomatic victory took place in Syria. Of course, with Syria in the middle of a civil war, it looks like the country’s main export is bad news. And when Obama leveraged Russia’s relationship with Syria to broker a deal to get rid of the latter’s chemical weapons, Republicans said Vladimir Putin made Obama look weak.

A funny thing happened on the way to the GOP’s deification of Putin: While Syrians were busy shooting each other, the country’s last supplies of chemical weapons—600 metric tons of it—left Syria on a Danish ship under the supervision of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. This is probably the best news you’ve never heard.

The rest of Jason Stanford's column can be found in today's R&D Department.

By Jason Stanford