A larger view, which I think you probably share, is that Obama's foreign policy has been a muddle for the last five years which has been extremely dangerous but because he is superficially nonconfrontational it has not appeared to be so. Where he should have been aggressive, with Iran when the people were on the streets and just about any other time to stop them getting the bomb, he has been pusillanimous.
I have a vanity going back some years arguing that it is a mistake to conceive of Obama as another Jimmy Carter. Obama is a radical ideologue who sees foreign policy myopically through that filter. History shows that leftists from Trotsky to Pol Pot have been bloodthirsty in the extreme when it comes to advancing or protecting their ideological agenda.
That is why there does not seem to be any identifiable connection between Obama's foreign policy and America's national interests-Obamas interests are ideological.
Or perhaps that of the puppet masters.
“A larger view, which I think you probably share, is that Obama’s foreign policy has been a muddle for the last five years..”
I would agree that our foreign policy has been a muddle since January of 1989.
“...which has been extremely dangerous but because he is superficially nonconfrontational it has not appeared to be so. Where he should have been aggressive, with Iran when the people were on the streets and just about any other time to stop them getting the bomb, he has been pusillanimous.”
I’m no fan of our involvement in the middle east at all. We should have left years ago and let the shia and sunni kill each other off as they’ve been doing for the last 1,000 years. We have nothing to win there and plenty of American lives and treasure to lose. At best, our long term involvement will keep Israel going. But at what point does Israel have to more or less stand on it’s own? The biggest threat to Israel in the long term is not it’s neighbors, rather the threat is it’s own internal demographics. Jews are slowly becoming a minority in Israel. We can’t resolve that problem for Israel unless, of course, we’re going to make it our policy to send Americans there to live to help stave off Israel’s demographic suicide. I just see the whole area as a major cluster that a wise nation should avoid. And more to the point, we simply can’t afford it anymore.
To paraphrase Geo. Washington: honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.
“Obama is a radical ideologue who sees foreign policy myopically through that filter.”
Of course he is. It’s unfortunate that there is no counterweight within Congress. But as I’ve pointed out countless times on this website, what we have is a one party system mimicking a two party system. The rhetoric differs somewhat, but the policies don’t. Until that dynamic changes, if it ever does, then we will be doomed to endure successive kakistocracies until the American experiment sees it’s official, and quite final, end.
yet a victory for the American people. If regular folks out in flyover country had not SPOKEN UP, they were ready to go through with this.
Moreover, it is a mistake to view Obama's foreign policy as simply "pro-Islamist" -- as has been demonstrated in every dealing with a Muslim country.
In fact, his preferences extend somewhat more broadly. He is remarkably "pro-authoritarian". Shimmer dissolve to the Honduras crisis in June of 2009 -- when Obama and the entire American foreign policy establishment demanded that Hondurans abandon their constitution and accept usurpation by Manuel Zelaya, who was nothing more than a puppet of Hugo Chavez.
Had Barack Obama been President of the USA in 1940 he would've told Winston Churchill to take a hike and cozied up to Adolf Hitler. And that is not a hyperbolic statement...