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Obama’s True Foreign-Policy ‘Weakness’
Obamas True Foreign-Policy Weakness
by Robert Parry
Published on Tuesday, June 24, 2014 by Consortiumnews.com
President Obama at a West Point graduation ceremony. (Credit: The U.S. Army/cc/flickr)A favorite neocon meme about President Barack Obama is that he is weak because he failed to bomb Syria, bomb Iran, sustain the U.S. occupation of Iraq and start a full-scale economic war with Russia over Ukraine. But an alternate way of looking at Obama is that he is weak because he has failed to face down the neocons.
Since the start of his presidency, Obama has let the neocons and their liberal interventionist allies push him into militaristic and confrontational policies even as he is criticized for not being militaristic and confrontational enough. There was the futile surge in Afghanistan, the chaotic regime change in Libya, excessive hostility toward Iran, intemperate demands for regime change in Syria, and hyperbolic denunciations of Russia for its reaction to U.S.-backed regime change in Ukraine.
The end result of all this U.S. tough-guy/gal-ism has been to get a lot of people killed without actually improving the lot of the people in the countries where the neocon-driven policies have been applied. In each of those cases, a more pragmatic approach to the political and strategic concerns represented by those crises could have saved lives and averted economic pain that only has fed more disorder.
Yet, Obama remains hypersensitive to criticism from well-placed and well-connected neocons. As the New York Times reported on June 16, Obama shaped his foreign policy speech at the West Point graduation in May to deflect criticism from a single neocon, Robert Kagan, who had penned a long and pedantic essay in The New Republic urging the projection of more U.S. power around the world.
In the essay, Superpowers Dont Get to Retire, Kagan depicted President Obama as presiding over an inward turn by the United States that threatened the global order and broke with more than 70 years of American presidents and precedence, wrote the Times Jason Horowitz. He called for Mr. Obama to resist a popular pull toward making the United States a nation without larger responsibilities, and to reassume the more muscular approach to the world out of vogue in Washington since the war in Iraq drained the country of its appetite for intervention.
As part of Obamas effort to deflect this neocon critique, the president even invited Mr. Kagan to lunch to compare world views, Horowitz reported.
Kagan apparently sees himself as a vanguard for a new wave of U.S. interventionism, teamed up with his brother Frederick who devised the two surges in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2009. Robert Kagan is also married to Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs who helped promote the February regime change in Ukraine.
Counting on Hillary Clinton
Kagan also has hopes that his neocon views which he prefers to call liberal interventionist will have an even stronger standing in a possible Hillary Clinton administration. After all, not only did Secretary of State Clinton promote his wife, Clinton also named Kagan to one of her State Department advisory boards.
According to the Times article, Clinton remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes. Kagan is quoted as saying: I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue its something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.
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http://consortiumnews.com/2014/06/23/obamas-true-foreign-policy-weakness/
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