Roger Cohen NYT 2/26/16
WASHINGTON — This is the speech President Obama did not make on his foreign policy (with thanks to Stephen Heintz, a shrewd observer of America’s role in the world):
In 2016, we have no business building other nations. It is for them to decide their fates. As a result, I have asked a lot of questions, so many that I hear that Bob Blackwill, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, calls me “the king of the slippery-slope school of foreign policy.”
I’ll take that moniker, if the alternative is to embrace feel-good posturing and drift into another intractable war in which young Americans die for murky causes in the indifferent sands of the Middle East.
Should I have backed the pro-democracy uprising of young Iranians in 2009 against the regime, and might American support have tipped the balance? Should I have done more to ensure the fragile Egyptian experiment in democracy did not fail by pressing former President Mohamed Morsi to restrain his divisive Muslim Brotherhood agenda? Should I have called the coup that ousted him a “coup”?
Should I have armed the rebels in Syria, or established a no-fly zone once President Bashar al-Assad began murdering his citizens en masse, or set up a safe area to protect desperate refugees as a gage of our determination? Should I have upheld through one-off punitive military strikes against Assad the “red line” I set against the use of chemical weapons and so demonstrated to the Saudis and other Sunni gulf states that I was not, as they believe, in the pocket of the Shia world? In short, should I have kept my word and taken more risks to save Syria, oust Assad and stop Putin dictating the outcome?
Perhaps. I know members of my foreign policy team have agonized over Syria and its quarter-million dead. One or two may have been close to resigning. The refugee flow into Europe destabilizes allies. But I do not lose sleep. This job is about tough choices. Restraint was the wiser option for a chastened America unready to pass the mantle but condemned now to share it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/opinion/obamas-implicit-foreign-policy.html?_r=0