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Originally Posted by LS Jaun
Apparently. And that is the source of Trumps popularity, the current Administrations crazy policies or lack there of.
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One of the interesting caricatures of President Obama is that he doesn’t believe that the U.S. is indispensable. You hear that from his critics all the time, that he’s a retrenchment president, he’s a withdrawal president, a declinist.
I think that’s wrong. I think he understands that America is indispensable to the smooth functioning of global affairs. I think he might be the first president who sometimes resents that role, who looks at our allies and thinks that these guys need to pay for something once in a while, these guys need to do more than they’re doing.
He is also a person who is more hesitant than the average president to use force, specifically in the Middle East. Now, there’s a contradiction here at the core of his presidency, which is that the president who his critics believe is almost a pacifist in some kind of way, a declinist, is also the greatest terrorist hunter in the history of the presidency.
What he does that annoys people on the right is that he has set a very high threshold for what constitutes a direct national security threat to the United States. But the people on the left understand him to be a ruthless hunter of terrorists, right? They have that — they have that right.
But I think the right gets it wrong. They have this caricature of this kind of feckless president who doesn’t defend the United States. For instance, they talk about ISIS as if we’re not currently fighting ISIS. But the U.S. is deeply engaged in that fight, and that, of course, comes from President Obama.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: To take one step back, I think he’s drawn two conclusions about the Middle East. One is that it’s not fixable by the United States. He’s also come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter that much, because we have become mainly energy-independent.
That moment, when he decided not to take unilateral action, to throw it to Congress and sort of put a pause on everything, that was his — that was a very proud moment for him.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The moment that a lot of people think was his weakest moment as president, he is recasting as his proudest moment, or the moment where he showed true leadership.
He believed that, if he had gone into Syria in 2013, the whole of his second term would have been eaten up, consumed by the Syrian civil war. And he looked at the situation in Iraq with George W. Bush as kind of a proof of that.
Without endorsing this view, I would say that his view is that, A, he is fighting ISIS, because ISIS does represent — unlike the Assad regime in his mind, ISIS represents a direct national security threat to the United States, because they kill American citizens. The refugee thing, I think, is the one that has sent them reeling a bit, especially because the European allies are begging the United States for more intervention.
So, the gamble that he’s made is that not intervening in Syria has saved America from untold crises and terrible crises and loss of life. And there’s a very good chance that he’s correct, and, in 10 years, we will all say, wow, that was really clever of him to sort of stay — to stay back.
Like, the toxicity never sort of drains from this relationship. You have in Benjamin Netanyahu basically a guy who came to America literally to subvert President Obama’s marquee foreign policy goal. And Obama won that battle, but he will never forget what Netanyahu did.
From Netanyahu’s perspective, Obama is hopelessly naive about the realities of the Middle East.
You know, whether you agree with President Obama’s world view or not, if you read this article in “The Atlantic,” you will see that he’s trying to reason his way through a set of very complicated challenges to the United States.
I don’t see anything resembling that kind of mature reasoning process going on in the debate we’re having around foreign policy. On the Republican side, you have people talking about carpet-bombing and committing war crimes and then reinstituting torture.
On the Democratic side, too, you have one of the two candidates has shown zero interest in actually thinking about foreign policy. I’m obviously talking about Bernie Sanders. There’s no doubt in my mind that President Obama does a lot of hard thinking about how to best manage the United States’ role in the world.
He might reach the wrong conclusions, and we don’t know. And we don’t know yet. We might not know for five or 10 or 15 or 20 years. But there is a process in place in his head, where he’s dealing with things in non-bumper sticker terms.
The problem for Obama is that none of his foreign policy ideas can fit on a bumper sticker. The problem in the campaign is that all of the foreign policy ideas fit on a bumper sticker. That’s the split.
The Atlantic examines Obama
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