Barack Obama’s badly flawed worldview and the incoherent foreign policy flowing from it have now disintegrated. Within the past few months, his media acolytes notwithstanding, the evidence has become conclusive: Obama’s presidency is gravely wounding America and its friends. His response to virtually every significant threat or crisis has either complicated or worsened the problem, or, at best, left it essentially no closer to resolution.
Obama has repeatedly highlighted his propensity to apologize for America’s past transgressions (as he defines them), and his disinclination to be assertive on our behalf. Indeed, so radically different is Obama from any prior American president that many observers have concluded that he has a comprehensive plan, and that somewhere in all that mess there must be a doctrine. Others look not for a plan, but for a plot; pop psychology and conspiracy theories abound as to why Obama is so comfortable, even enthusiastic, about American decline.
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But it is folly to look for rhyme and reason when there is neither.
For better or worse, there is no single dispositive flaw in Obama’s doctrine, since there is little that resembles a doctrine. His saunter through world affairs is unstructured. Instead, the explanation for his policy’s failure, and its well-deserved collapse now unfolding before us, lies in a jumbled mix of philosophy, political priorities, and personal inadequacy. Like Obama’s presidency generally, his national-security flaws combine ideology, naïveté, weakness, lack of leadership, intellectual laziness, and a near-religious faith in negotiation for its own sake.
Perhaps most significantly, Obama is simply not interested in foreign and defense policy. To state such a proposition about a U.S. president seems counterintuitive or even shocking, but Obama is different from all of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat, since Franklin Roosevelt. His first thought on awakening each morning is not about threats to America, its global interests, and its friends and allies, but about his efforts to radically restructure our economy and society. That is where his intellect and his heart are focused, and his lack of attention to the rest of the world is palpable. When Obama has no other choice but to concentrate on international affairs — such as during the Afghanistan surge or the killing of Osama bin Laden — he will do so, but only for as long as is necessary to address the immediate problem before him.
In those few national-security areas where Obama does his homework, a second characteristic predominates: He simply does not see much occurring internationally that threatens American interests. Such a benign view of a chaotic world may be even more shocking than his general lack of interest, but it is yet another reflection of his underlying intellectual laziness. He is most politely described as credulous and inexperienced, especially for someone who lived overseas as a child. During both the 2008 campaign and his presidency, for example, Obama has downplayed the very concept of a “global war on terror,” treated nuclear proliferation as a side issue, and ignored the enormous strategic threats posed by a rising China and a belligerent Russia. American decline, most recently reflected in S&P’s downgrade of America’s sovereign debt to below France’s level, is untroubling and even natural to him.
In days gone by, Americans with such attitudes were classified as isolationists. But the president is no advocate of insularity, instead choosing multilateralism and expressing it in rhetoric that could have come straight from its source, Woodrow Wilson. It was Wilson, after all, and not our first community-organizer president, who insisted that “there must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.” Here is the ideology of negotiation and global governance in its fullest flower.
Mr. Bolton encapsulates an American sentiment which is beginning to be seen at the polls. With Robert Turner's win in NYC's 9th Congressional speical election another nail has been driven into the coffin of this administration. "See something, say something?" Ok, I will. I see a ground swell that indicates the arousal of America's patriotic soul.
Important stuff, but the "fruit" of his labors are somewhere off in the distance.
Like this article's identification of hollowness, Hanson today talks about an empty quiver. But I have to go with Sowell's admonition that it is political perception, not reality that wins the day.
With "ideology, naïveté, weakness, lack of leadership, intellectual laziness, and a near-religious faith in negotiation for its own sake" as Obama's characteristics, he's got half of the voters identifying with him and the two Republican front runners at this time have little to distinguish themselves from him on a number of those "qualities" and their general hollowness.
Obama and Clinton have now made an argument for not toppling dictators, religious discrimination. They said, according to the Washington Post, that by toppling murderous, oppressive, deviant dictators like Kaddafi and Mubarak, the people will be introduced to religious intolerance.; a claim that I find absolutely baseless and pure propaganda. It is also an excuse to not get involved in Syria, Lebanon, or Yemen while there is Iranian supported slaughter going on daily.
Obama and Clinton have now made an argument for not toppling dictators, religious discrimination. They said, according to the Washington Post, that by toppling murderous, oppressive, deviant dictators like Kaddafi and Mubarak, the people will be introduced to religious intolerance.; a claim that I find absolutely baseless and pure propaganda. It is also an excuse to not get involved in Syria, Lebanon, or Yemen while there is Iranian supported slaughter going on daily.
I'm always amused by the people who couldn't have gotten into UChicago to experience Obama as a professor themselves, yet take cheap potshots at his teaching as though they know anything about it.
For whatever else you want to say about him, the guy was a very successful law professor -- widely respected by people like Posner (Richard and Eric), Epstein, and Easterbrook.
As a president? Well...maybe not so much. But this idea that just because he plays for the "other team" in politics, you're going to assume that he's somehow evil or stupid or bad at everything? That's just ignorant. The man was a good law professor...and is not such a great president. But cheap potshots are just cheap.
i think it's pretty safe to say, now that we have watched him ignore both the law and that which governs it, that chances are relatively slim he was any good at teaching it
"how to circumvent the law 101" - maybe...but not law in general no way no how
There is no evidence Obama himself could have been admitted to Chicago without affirmative action. If he doesn't want that assumption being made about himself, he should release his pre-law credentials.
I am very tired of Mr. Obama being referred to as a law professor. He was a lecturer, non-tenure track. Period.
Would that he had remained as such. Our national media's inability to vet him during the campaign is the only reason this person was elected.
I am very tired of Mr. Obama being referred to as a law professor. He was a lecturer, non-tenure track. Period.
Would that he had remained as such. Our national media's inability to vet him during the campaign is the only reason this person was elected.
The damage Obama has done to the economy is obvious and present to us (though even now we do not understand how bad it really is.)
The damage he has done to diplomacy in service to American interests is far worse - but neither obvious nor present to us. Obama has given us a world in which, even now, tyrants are plotting the challenges they will visit on us to our sorrow.
I pray for the next president, who will likely have to try to deal with the global war and economic collapse will bequeath him. I remember in 2008, listening to the wild, enthusiastic, even orgiastic responses to Obama's empty rhetoric. I thought to myself that I had always heard that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I did not know until then that the road would also be lined with cheering crowds of idiots who did not know they were cheering their own downfall.
What world-view? Obama has no time or frankly, interest, for such boring trivialities. He's too busy enjoying the life of a celebrity, planning his next lavish vacation and campaigning.
This is one of the most trenchant and insightful analyses of Obama's foreign policy I've seen.
I still question, though, how much method there is to Obama's madness. Bolton says there is no method, and others say it doesn't matter, because, if Obama's shenanigans are all born of incompetence and misled ideological stupidity, they could hardly be less damaging than if he were intentionally weakening and humiliating this nation.
But I think it does matter, and should be the subject of further research and debate, this question of whether the disaster of his presidency is intentional or not. There are enough Americans out there who, if they could, would actually destroy their own country. We all know it. Why are we so sure he's not one of them?
Could someone please fill me in on the evidence of President Obama's "intelligence?" While I fundamentally agree with HDRider's "professor" comment, I would append "poseur" to it. He's a product of social and academic favoritism, with few if any intellectual accomplishments. Two vanity books doth not a robust corpus comprise.
Hey John, I am sure you are still embarrassed and mortified about the 'bad' intelligence you relied on to get us into Iraq and wake up every day wanting to say your sorry to the 5,000 men and women your 'bad' intelligence killed. But they can't hear you maybe you can say your sorry to the 25,000 your 'bad' intelligence maimed.
BTW: Obama got Osama
