Obama vs. 70 Years of Postwar Global Order

National Review ^ | 6/2/2015 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Servant of the Cross]

Where previous presidents fostered American strength, Obama revels in weakness.

Director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, set during the Depression, was a divine counterfactual thought experiment designed to remind a suicidal George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) that his hometown, Bedford Falls, would have turned out to be a pretty miserable place called Pottersville without his seemingly ordinary presence.

Consider the Obama administration’s first six years as a prolonged counterfactual take on what the world might have been like for the last 70 years without a traditionally engaged American president dedicating our country to preserving the postwar Western-inspired global order.

The what-if dream seems to be working to show the vast alterations in a world that Westerners once took for granted. France, a perennial critic of America, is suddenly an unlikely international activist. For seven decades, the French harped about American hyperpuissance – on the implied assurance that such triangulating would be ignored by an easily caricatured, aw-shucks American George Bailey trying his best to keep things in the global community from falling apart.

But now the Johnny-on-the-spot American everyman is gone, and lots of things have filled the vacuum. An overwhelmed France nevertheless intervened in Mali to staunch Islamic extremism. It bombed Libya, and then discovered that the United States’ new policy of “lead from behind” meant that America was no more likely to clean up the ensuing post-Qaddafi mess than was France — especially given that the new Mogadishu-on-the-Mediterranean was not far from Marseilles, but an Atlantic Ocean away from New York and Washington.

[Servant of the Cross]

VDH ping ...

[Servant of the Cross]

[2ndDivisionVet]

100 Days of Being a Laughingstock in Paris (Obama versus the CIA)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2298074/posts

[Ben Ficklin]

Hansen can call it the Post War period but most would divide that into Post WW2 period, The Cold War Period, and the Post Cold War Period.

And you can further divide the Post Cold War Period into the Post 9-11 period, the Post Bush period(2006), and the Post bin Laden period.

You can also look at the US's role in the world based on trade and commerce.

In the Post WW2 period the US had an international competitive edge so we pursued multi-lateral trade via the WTO. But as the rest of the world recovered from WW2, the US gradually lost that edge.

So, beginning with Reagan, we began to pursue bilateral and regional trade agreements.