After looking at Steve M.’s take on President Obama’s foreign policy polling numbers, I suspect that Robert Kagan is correct about this:
A majority of Americans may not want to intervene in Syria, do anything serious about Iran or care what happens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt or Ukraine. They may prefer a minimalist foreign policy in which the United States no longer plays a leading role in the world and leaves others to deal with their own miserable problems. They may want a more narrowly self-interested American policy. In short, they may want what Obama so far has been giving them. But they’re not proud of it, and they’re not grateful to him for giving them what they want.
President Obama has largely been doing what the American people say they want, even on the Crimean issue, yet the American people are unhappy with the president’s performance. On Crimea, the people want contradictory things. They want something done, but they reject everything except sanctions, which is exactly what the president decided to do.
I don’t know if pride is really the key here, but it could be. Ironically, even Kagan’s piece follows this pattern. He claims that the president isn’t leading, or that he’s leading a retreat from the world stage, but he doesn’t actually mention anything that the president ought to be doing that he isn’t doing. He doesn’t say that the president ought to do more to deter or punish Russia, and he makes no suggestions about what might be done differently with Iran or Syria, or any other hot spot.
I think, overall, the American people wish we could solve some of these problems, but they have no idea how to solve them and don’t support trying to solve them. In the end, a president gets rewarded for sticking his neck out if, and only if, he is successful. That’s why the following is meaningless:
Presidents are not always rewarded for doing what the public says it wants. Sometimes they are rewarded for doing just the opposite. Bill Clinton enjoyed higher approval ratings after intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo, even though majorities of Americans had opposed both interventions before he launched them. Who knows what the public might have thought of Obama had he gone through with his planned attack on Syria last August? As Col. Henry Stimson observed, until a president leads, he can’t expect the people to “voluntarily take the initiative in letting him know whether or not they would follow him if he did take the lead.”
President Clinton was rewarded because his unpopular interventions in the Balkans were basically successful. No one has demonstrated how we could be similarly successful in a place like Syria or how we could convince Russia to give the Crimea back to Ukraine.
Of course our TradMed doesn’t help things. And they don’t note when idiots like Twitter-famous Schindler have a vested interest in wanting a larger army and stationing more troops overseas. They don’t note how we always seem to have money for overseas clusterfucks but we can’t afford, supposedly, to make sure everyone has decent jobs or healthcare.
who is Twitter-famous Schindler?
aka 20committee. The guy who, according to his Twitter bio, is a prof at the Naval War College.
Exactly what I was going to say. People don’t really have strong opinions about these complicated foreign policy issues, and no good source of independent info, so they are heavily swayed by media reporting. And the big media channels are either owned outright by the RW Wurlitzer and the neocons or highly sympathetic for a variety of personal and economic reasons (war sells ads on news channels).
Stomping the shit out of a bunch of defenseless foreigners has been one of the easiest and most handsomely rewarded domestic policies in all of history.
I am completely, utterly fed up with “the American people” and what they want and what they don’t want. Obama has always had the potential to be one of our greatest presidents, but has been held back by so much idiotic Republican and Tea Party opposition that he hasn’t been able to prove himself. Even the dumbass Democrats have failed to back him on key issues.
So whether it’s foreign policy, health care, minimum wage, or basketball brackets, the American people will never be satisfied with him. He could singlehandedly find the cure for cancer, and they would accuse him of stealing jobs from the medical and funeral industries.
I say fuck ’em. I say let Obama be Obama and let the morons in Congress keep snapping and snarling until Obama accomplishes whatever he can.
Same deal with FDR, but the “Tea Party” was fewer people back then.
How can the Putin
seizureliberation of the Crimea not hurt Obama? It’s a black eye for all of his friends.After all, a portion of what was once Ukraine has been rescued from the clutches of the IMF, NATO, the EU, the European Central Bank, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, various American three-letter agencies, the Frankfurt Börse, and Angela Merkel.
I mean, you can’t be thrilled about who has set them free, but they are free now.
It’s just a question of who will rescue the rest of Ukraine from the same octopus.
Because even when foreigners have agency — and they usually don’t; that’s what the CIA is for — they’re incapable of exercising it wisely.
The “White House” is schizophrenic and doesn’t speak with one voice. The speech by President Obama in Brussels made no sense whatsoever to Europeans. Seeking to isolate a nuclear-armed “regional” power and placing the nation under economic sanctions is a path leading to war. Surely this is a lesson learned from the 20th century: Germany after World War I and Japan in the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I’m not happy with the policy lines put forward by Obama’s National Security team: Susan Rice, Tony Blinken, William Burns and Samantha Power. In Brussels, that wasn’t Barack Obama speaking from his intellect nor from the heart. It seemed more an imposter. I say this with much regret.
Vicky Nuland and neocon consortium managed a coup d’etat in Kiev, against all previous agreements made in tri-partite meeting with Russia. It’s the region where a single-shot led to massive casualties exactly 100 years ago. US “diplomacy” is too confrontational and has led to no tangible results on the world stage. The US has turned to subversive methods of a prior Cold War era.
Living in a bubble, is the US president too isolated?
○ Amb. Susan Rice Diplomacy: U.S. is ‘disgusted’ over UN Syria veto
○ Rice and Kerry: War Inside the White House
○ US Security Adviser Rice Threatens Russia’s Putin
○ Demonizing Putin Endangers America’s Security plus my diary: Making An Enemy.
Guess you missed his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. You may not like that Barack Obama, but he’s real and not the imaginary one you’ve constructed. He hired all those people you seem to think lead him astray. Bollocks!
From Pierce, who normally bends over backwards to speak well of Democrats and Obama, but can’t manage being a pretzel:
I admit I was way too kind. I did post my comment minutes after the President finished his speech, the disappointment has lasted much longer.
It’s difficult for those that believe whatever to see and/or hear clearly. Within days and within his first year in office, Obama displayed all his stripes — and therefore, no reason to cut him any slack. In the margins he’s only slightly preferable to McCain or Romney. But much better to have Biden as VP than Palin or Ryan.
Have you been following Turkey blocks YouTube days after Twitter crackdown?
Rumor (so far) is that Kerry was involved in some way.
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Excellent Coverage at Moon of Alabama, I added my diary …
○ Syria: Erdogan’s False Flag Invasion Plans Revealed on YouTube
Please note Erdogan’s Turkey is a NATO partner and fully supported by US President Obama to make waves in Syria. On the border are NATO Patriot missile batteries manned by The Netherlands and United States. I understood in the leaked conversation Secretary Kerry was mentioned and the fact all costs of rebel support would be funded by the emir of Qatar.
It seems that at least some folks want the US to have the appearance of being tough/world leader but not really anything more than that. Our resident wingnut said pretty much that in somewhat different language. Perhaps they would be satisfied if the president arm wrestled Putin.
People, and many in the media, are simply upset because Obama isn’t giving them another one of these iconic American masturbatory moments.
It’s nothing more than a toxic brew of testosterone, American exceptionalism and hatred of the fact that a black Kenyan Islamocommunifascist resides at 1600 Pennsylavania Avenue.
How long would it take for the Grahams and the McCains of the world to do a 180 and start calling the President a “war criminal” if he decided to suddenly start “shock and awe” in the Ukraine? I would guess about as long as it takes me to say the word “HYPOCRITE”.
So now neocon Kagan thinks that the US did NOT “play a leading role” in Ukraine, even though his highly-placed diplomat wife advocated that Ukrainians flush their constitution and depose an elected (pro-Russian) prez? And implemented who-knows-what other “pro-democracy” intelligence aids? I guess when a neocon policy blows up in our face and results in quite predictable negative geopolitical consequences, this is “not playing a leading role”. Comic.
I suppose most people everywhere don’t exactly enjoy seeing political oppression and civil war violence and civilian casualties on their teevee screens, where ever it may be happening. Americans especially think that we have some sort of magic power to prevent foreign crises if only our omniscient prez acts properly. This is all part of the simpleminded American Exceptionalism idea, which has been our imagined birthright after all these decades of bloated “defense” budgets and very frequent hot wars. We, after all, are a warlike people, with some regions of the country more than others.
So perhaps Americans think all these deaths and crises and sad situations could have been somehow prevented from ever happening by Obama and thus don’t give him high marks—even though, once they do occur Americans (thankfully) are finally starting to question exactly how much we can and should “do” about it. And even whether our national interest is involved! So the days of Col. Stimson’s gibberish may be coming to a close.
One can expect the “conservative” movement to work to exacerbate the US “humiliation” and “weakness” angle in years to come, and wax eloquent about the days when we were “strong” and deployed armored infantry where ever we wanted around the globe to show our always iron resolve. Low-grade shame-honor manipulation. The true test of whether an actual change in public thinking has occurred will be how this predictable return-to-militarism message is received. It’s getting some trial runs now.
Clinton was successful in Kosovo, because there was a success to be had there: stopping genocide/ethnic cleansing. He probably fucked up in Bosnia by restarting the process and arriving where Bush 41 was in ’92. But in Kosovo he had a clearly definable objective.
Kind of like, I dunno, Libya?
Except Putin and Russia as a whole have always wanted revenge for those events and have finally taken it. So it may in fact be a distant cause of the current troubles.
When pollsters ask people about a politician’s performance, these days most folks interpret that as a call to be a drama critic. Folks like the policy but don’t like that the White House narrative runs obliquely to counter to the actions that actually take place. But Obama is constrained to talk tough and not level with people about the real situation in the world of the “soft on…[fill in the blank]” claims by John McCain and the GOP start gaining traction with the public.
In this case, the actions are more important than the public opinion about performance. It would be nice if the President had some Democratic support in Congress on forcibly pushing back on the bedwetting fantasies and delusions of power like Kagan’s.
At this point in his Presidency, the only performance appraisal that President Obama should care about are the first historians out of the gate (real historians because you know Jerome Corsi will be first to publish) after he leaves office in January 2017.
With proper follow-through between now and then it is possible Kagan and his pals will be seen as the nitwits they are.
Normalized relationships with all countries. Slow demilitarization of global politics. No chemical and biological weapons countries left and a continued OPCW monitoring operation. Reduced US national security budgets into reduced global national security budgets. Recognition that the days of Kim are over and it was just a fictional account during a period of the rapid expansion of competitive imperialism anyway. All of those possibilities are latent in the current situation.
We will shortly between the US and Russia have one-sixth of the nuclear weapons that we had in 1986 when Ronald Reagan almost tripped up the neo-cons by agreeing to a nuclear-free world. The next step is to bring the agreement down to the level that can include China in the negotiations. The other major challenge is getting Israel to join non-proliferation efforts, list its weapons, and begin dismantling them. An agreement on reductions of weapons grade uranium stockpiles is rapidly looking attractive to lots of nations as an anti-terrorism measure.
In the US in 2014, the political culture will either change or we are going to continue to be in deep trouble.
Re the first paragraph. Drum pointed out that regarding pushing the deadline for insurance sign ups back, Bush would have given a speech and depicted it
a positive, Obama had it released by aides quietly as if he is embarrassed. Really telling in the issues of presentation versus policy.
Well, the US has run into a formidable opponent for once: Russia. It is not Grenada or Panama or Iraq or wherever. Start a war with Russia and it can lead to only one thing. The mushroom cloud Ms C. Rice once thrilled the world with, but only this time it could really be real, to the nth degree. Moreover, who cares what the US people ‘want’? Who are these people anyway and how can anyone know what a ‘people’ might want. Victoria Nuland knew what she wanted. So there, Barak Obama, or where you in on Mrs. Kagan’s tricks and did you want the same thing? If so, you got blowback of unexpected determination in the person of Vladimir Putin. And now the US people might have to go and find a more compliant victim. Not even little Cuba has yet succumbed to the big bully up north. So what are those people talking about: in fact the country has hardly got beyond World War 2, a superpower, a hegemon, stuck in a time warp.
I hope this disgruntled attitude is the last gasp of American exceptionalism. We should all throw up our hands is disgust and tell the rest of the world to go to hell. I don’t much like the fact that Obama still clings to the notion that America has to provide “leadership” in the world so I disapprove of his performance too.