Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Obama’s Foreign Policy

8 Comments

…is based in fantasy:

For five years, the Obama administration has chosen to see the world as they wish it to be, not as it is. In this fantasy world, the attack in Fort Hood is “workplace violence.” The Christmas Day bomber is an “isolated extremist.” The attempted bombing in Times Square is a “one-off” attack. The attacks in Benghazi are a “spontaneous” reaction to a YouTube video. Al Qaeda is on the run. Bashar al-Assad is a “reformer.” The Iranian regime can be sweet-talked out of its nuclear weapons program. And Vladimir Putin is a new, post-Cold War Russian leader.

In the real world, it was a pen pal of the late jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki who opened fire on soldiers at Fort Hood. The Christmas bomber was dispatched from Yemen, where he was instructed by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Times Square bomber was trained and financed by the Pakistani Taliban. Benghazi was a deliberate attack launched by well-known terrorist groups. Al Qaeda is amassing territory and increasing its profile. Assad is a brutal dictator, responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 Syrians. The Iranian regime is firmly entrenched as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror and remains determined to lead a nuclear state. And in Russia we face a Cold War throwback willing to use force to expand Russian influence.

Well, to be fair, his domestic policies are based on fantasies, too.

8 thoughts on “Obama’s Foreign Policy”

  1. Molotov cocktail boy – caught with kerosene, gasoline, and lots of bottles burns himself to death.

    “The FBI has relayed that, to date, they have not developed any information or evidence indicating criminal intent in this investigation.’

    Law enforcement officials determined that Akhshabi wasn’t a threat to the Georgia Tech community”

    Call it Jihadism.

    1. Obama’s great goal in foreign policy is to wind down inherited conflicts — including the war on terror — in order to give his activist domestic agenda a fighting chance.

      What an absolute crock. How anyone can look over the past 5 years and see any “great goal” at all is stretching reality to a level most people require pharmaceuticals to obtain. But don’t worry, it’s all about an activist domestic agenda. And “fighting”. What putrefied mush. I can’t believe I need some pepto bismol from browsing less that a third of that.

      Bob, just so you’re aware, everyone sees clearly why you statist idiots squeal like stuck pigs every time Obama’s “foreign policy” gets criticized. It’s because the majority of it to date has been directed by Hillary Clinton, the democratic party nominee for president in 2016. Just to anticipate a possible yammer from you four years from now: “Why is this unmitigated disaster in Albania Clinton’s fault and 1945 Prague wasn’t Truman’s fault?”, the answer will be because Clinton is a woman and Truman was a man.

      So you don’t need to wait four years to get to work on that, OK?

  3. Obama’s handling of what is going on in Ukraine is just a small part of his relationship with Russia and his foreign policy as a whole. As Rand’s link shows, Obama has been dishonest in his portrayal of events and his foreign policy is based on magical thinking.

  4. Those statements about how Putin’s response is not a 21st century response are, I think, the most pathetic statements ever made by any US politician. It demonstrates a raging fantasy about how the world works. It’s dangerous.

    This guys says it best. Read the whole thing…link at the bottom.

    Ukrainian Lessons for an American President

    BY LEON WIESELTIER

    “There is the question of how to respond practically to Putin’s aggression and there is the question of how to respond intellectually. The latter is no less important than the former, because the Ukrainian crisis is not a transient event but a lasting circumstance with which we will be wrestling for a long time. We must mentally arm ourselves against a reality about which we only recently disarmed ourselves: the reality of protracted conflict. The lack of preparedness at the White House was not merely a weakness of policy but also a weakness of worldview. The president is too often caught off guard by enmity, and by the nastiness of things. There really is no excuse for being surprised by evil. There is also no excuse for projecting one’s good intentions, one’s commitment to reason, one’s optimism about history, upon other individuals and other societies and other countries: narcissism is the enemy of empiricism, and we must perceive differences and threats empirically, lucidly, not with disbelief but with resolve. “Our opinions do not coincide,” Putin said after meeting with Obama last year. The sentence reverberates.”
    ……………..
    ”

    http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116892/what-obama-needs-learn-putins-invasion-ukraine

  5. The root of Obama’s foreign policy woes is, indeed, a defective worldview. One of its main defects is the simple inability to appreciate that other players on the world stage have different worldviews and goals. The Russians and Chinese, for example, are – and have been for centuries – possessed of the idea that the greatness of a nation is measured in territory conquered and unwilling subjects added to one’s empire. This is a metric that was equally familiar and esteemed by the Romans, Old Persia and Pharaonic Egypt not to mention the major European powers and Japan as recently as WW2.

    The Russians have a particularly bad case of Empire fever and have repeatedly demonstrated that there is no piece of inhabited ground so miserable, malarial or fly-blown and no indigenes so primitive, hostile or refractory that Mother Russia will not hazard an attempt at imperial expansion in these worthless and wretched locales. How else does one explain all the post-WW2 meddling in the African leavings of others’ former imperia? And then there’s that ne plus ultra of blind allegiance to imperial imperative, Afghanistan in 1979-89. Attempts at imperial expansion are, to Russia, like the outbursts of Tourette’s sufferers, the dyskinesia of Parkinson’s or the obsessive rituals of OCD – a pathological tic that is seemingly impossible to resist.

Comments are closed.