…without American influence. That’s the logical outcome of the Obama policies. And a preferable one, for many on the left. They’d prefer a world without American influence. Because America is, you know, evil.
[Update a few minutes later]
Obama’s strikingly unilateral foreign policy:
Maureen Dowd doesn’t see any pattern to the President’s actions. She believes that the President’s pique at Israel was spontaneous because of the “supremely aggravating character of Bibi Netanyahu”, but Kagan suggests the President has a tendency to take alliances for granted while attempting to mollify enemies. This makes sense from a certain point of view. He’s a wooer, not a keeper. His whole life has been focused on getting to the next rung, the next office. Once that rung is attained, why it’s meant to be stepped on to get to the one above. And why not? Since your friends are already your friends you don’t need to be nice to them. On the other hand you have to convince your enemies to like you because they don’t like you yet. And a smart man should unsentimentally work on them.
…The problem is that over the long haul international relations are about the keeping, not the wooing. Building a really stable international framework, as opposed to getting a photo op, means creating a foundation based on shared values. Sometimes the bad guys like being bad guys. After all is said and done, Venezuela will import 30,000 Cuban advisers whether Obama has been nice to Chavez or not. Although it’s politically incorrect to say it, one reason why America has enemies is because there are some countries out there that are not worth making friends with.
Read all. Carly Simon is involved, too.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More thoughts from Geraghty:
The Economist: “Friends have spats, but this seems to be more than that. America has not simply accepted Mr Netanyahu’s prompt apology. Opinion in the administration is said to be divided. Mr Biden himself and many State Department officials, together with George Mitchell, who was to have supervised the now-stalled proximity talks, advised cooling things down. But, whether out of rage or calculation, Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton preferred to escalate.”
Boy, there’s a reassuring calculation about what drives our policy choices, huh? 50/50 shot this is deliberate or we’re just lashing out at blind rage at the one ally in the region we would trust in a back-alley knife fight. And how utterly screwed are we when Joe Biden has become the voice of reason on Middle East policy?
Well, that was the excuse they made for the lunatic decision of nominating him.
The subtext of the Kagan column from yesterday was pretty clear: all around the world, we’re spitting on our allies and groveling before our enemies and the most hostile states. For two years, we argued that the world didn’t work the way Obama said it did; now we’re getting to see the results.
And three more years of it to look forward to.
Influence isn’t free. Libertarians as well as liberals may lean toward a US that doesn’t try to impose its will on the rest of the world, not because the US is evil, but because removing one more excuse for government gigantism is a good thing.
Influence isn’t free.
Nope. But having none, particularly in the Middle East, can get very expensive as well.
Relinquishing our role in the Middle East would probably be a good idea, but not without a long-term strategy for doing it. Right now, we’re embedded–literally–and we’re still looked to by most of the world to keep the region relatively stable. Scaring Israel by ill-considered policies and pronouncements is far more likely to destabilize the region that to do anything constructive. The Israelis don’t have clean hands, but I think they remain in a superior moral position to their neighbors, who would be quite content to replace the country with a crater.
From my perspective, the strategic interests we have–primarily oil–are much less important to the U.S., which gets something like 18% of its oil from there, than to our allies, particularly the Europeans. I think we should tell them on the q.t. that the problems there are no longer a leading concern for us.
I tend to like supporting liberal countries like Israel (or poor Taiwan) to some extent, but most of them can function without direct U.S. intervention.
I wonder about the timing on all of this. After all, the proximate cause (a relatively small number of new apartments being built) seems awfully limited, yet Obama and Clinton seem almost obsessed with making a big deal out of the whole thing. I wonder if there isn’t something else going on…
If the US was aware that the Israelis were considering strikes against Iran in the near future, wouldn’t this be a wonderful way of obtaining some plausible deniability? After all, the Israelis would do our dirty work for us, and the US could quite creditably claim that not only did they have nothing to do with it, but that they completely opposed it all along. They could point to this issue as evidence of their disconnection from Israel…
Nope, probably a bit too conspiratorial….stilll….
After all, the proximate cause (a relatively small number of new apartments being built) seems awfully limited
Limited to whom? Netanyahu assured Obama that there’d be no new construction in East Jerusalem while proximate talks were being arranged, and out come 1,600 apartments. If there’s a plot here it’s a plot by people in Bibi’s government to scuttle the talks.