Barack Obama
Related: About this forumThe Obama Doctrine (from The Atlantic)
Long article about President Obama's thoughtful, nuanced, and carefully considered foreign policy.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/
Todays_Illusion
(1,209 posts)Tree Frog
(25 posts)...I listened to a discussion from the author of the article on Charlie Rose. Jeffery Goldberg wrote it. I was impressed and look forward to reading the article.
Here is the link- the story about Obama starts at 6 min 50 sec mark.
http://www.pbs.org/video/2365688638/
lovemydog
(11,833 posts)I think the President explains how the decision not to use military force is often as gut-wrenching as deciding to use it.
Tree Frog
(25 posts)I wanted to read this after hearing so much about it. Thanks!
lovemydog
(11,833 posts)Obama has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about Americas role in it. The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be little an American president could do to make it a better place. The third is that the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power. The fourth is that the world cannot afford to see the diminishment of U.S. power. Just as the leaders of several American allies have found Obamas leadership inadequate to the tasks before him, he himself has found world leadership wanting: global partners who often lack the vision and the will to spend political capital in pursuit of broad, progressive goals, and adversaries who are not, in his mind, as rational as he is. Obama believes that history has sides, and that Americas adversariesand some of its putative allieshave situated themselves on the wrong one, a place where tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and militarism still flourish. What they dont understand is that history is bending in his direction.
The central argument is that by keeping America from immersing itself in the crises of the Middle East, the foreign-policy establishment believes that the president is precipitating our decline, Ben Rhodes told me. But the president himself takes the opposite view, which is that overextension in the Middle East will ultimately harm our economy, harm our ability to look for other opportunities and to deal with other challenges, and, most important, endanger the lives of American service members for reasons that are not in the direct American national-security interest.
If you are a supporter of the president, his strategy makes eminent sense: Double down in those parts of the world where success is plausible, and limit Americas exposure to the rest. His critics believe, however, that problems like those presented by the Middle East dont solve themselvesthat, without American intervention, they metastasize.