Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Obama's Foreign Policy

http://www.detnews.com/article/20090616/OPINION01/906160319/1008/opinion01/Earnest-goodwill-doesn-t-substitute-for-foreign-policy

This doesn't seem especially coherent to me. He calls Obama a Wilsonian idealist, but then says that he hasn't changed Bush's foreign policy except at the margins. In other words, he talks like an idealist and acts like a realist? And this means he lacks a foreign policy? Reagan talked of abolishing nukes. Was he an idealist without a foreign policy? Bush II tried to democratize the Middle East (surely an idealistic notion). Was he an idealist without a foreign policy? In the end, most ambitious presidents discover that they have less power to alter the course of world history than they would like to think or boast of.

Israel is not an ally. It is a disease our political system has contracted from the Israel lobby. Unless that nation can demonstrate symbiotic characteristics with respect to our body politic, it ought to be flushed out of our system and left to seek some other host.

 
Neither Clinton nor Bush accomplished anything with N. Korea either--it is a virtual protectorate of China. On Iran a little discretion is advisable since our interference is unlikely to help the opposition at this juncture (as Bush's Iran expert Mr. Burns argued on Charlie Rose recently).
 
Just because certain ideologues in this country are shrieking that Obama is weak does not make it so--and hopefully their misguided efforts will be properly dismissed by our adversaries as those nations reformulate their strategies in face of the new administration. But, BO really should give up on the "apologize for America" shtick.

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