President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy

Washington Post ^ | Mar 2, 2014 | WaPo Editorial Board

[LeoWindhorse]

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces.

[GOPJ]

Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not received the memo on 21st-century behavior. Neither has China’s president, Xi Jinping, who is engaging in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and the weaker nations of Southeast Asia. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is waging a very 20th-century war against his own people, sending helicopters to drop exploding barrels full of screws, nails and other shrapnel onto apartment buildings where families cower in basements. These men will not be deterred by the disapproval of their peers, the weight of world opinion or even disinvestment by Silicon Valley companies. They are concerned primarily with maintaining their holds on power.

Jeff - this is worth reading. Seems not all people who write for the Washington Post live in Unicorn land...

[DJ Taylor]

Mar 2, 2014

There Will Be Blood, Our Own

by Angelo M. Codevilla

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/03/02/there-will-be-blood-our-own/

“Combining the unbridled tongue with the unready hand.” Thus did Theodore Roosevelt define statesmanship at its worst. This is what America’s bipartisan ruling class is giving us.

The Obama Administration tried buffering last week’s announcement that it is reducing the US Army’s size to below its levels of 1940 (when the world’s population was less than one third what it is today) by suggesting that it would concentrate on mastery of the sea and of space. But the announcement’s not-so fine print envisaged cutting the number of US aircraft carriers, among other things. Like its predecessors, this administration is committed not to build the weapons that would let America secure orbital space for our own satellites and against ballistic missiles coming our way. As under its predecessors, this administration is devoting fewer and fewer dollars to weapons and to those who use them, while it diverts more and more to bureaucracy. Today, more than half of military personnel are behind desks.

The bottom line is that the United States of America has an increasingly hollow military. As politicians of both parties issue sonorous warnings and give inflammatory advice as if they were responsible for everything under the sun, American soldiers and sailors are spread around the globe, less feared and hence more hated, exposed to attacks against which they are less and less able to defend themselves. With ever less capacity to deal with the situations into which they are thrust, they are becoming symbols of American decline rather than of strength.

Consider East Asia, where the US Navy enforced America’s peace for three generations. Today America’s incapacity to deal with China’s (and its North Korean surrogate’s) assertion of power over the Western Pacific is the catalyst of rising Japanese militarism and of the rest of the region’s scramble for security. That incapacity is as political as it is military. While China is building a credible force of ballistic missiles, swarms of cruise missiles from sea and airborne platforms, as well as bottom-dwelling submarines to sink US Navy ships that come too close, our navy has shrunk in size, its pilots have less flight hours than their Chinese counterparts, and it lacks missile defenses. Moreover, the US government has been steady in its decision not to base its military position in the South China Sea on the unsinkable island of Taiwan. Too provocative.

But although the US preoccupation with not provoking China has not moderated Chinese military preparations, it surely has helped provoke the rebirth of Japanese militarism. Polls show that four fifths of Japanese view China as an enemy, but fewer than half have confidence in America’s help because they view America, correctly, as willing to sacrifice Japan’s interests to China’s.

We Americans have maintained our version of peace in the Western Pacific not in the interest of Japan or of anyone else, but in our own. Should we, upon deliberation, decide not to impede China’s assertion of power in the region, and to countenance whatever efforts (including nuclear ones) Japan will make to protect itself, it would make sense for us to withdraw our fleet from the region. Keeping it there without the military capacity or the political intention to maintain the Pax Americana would only get us into the middle of a war for stakes largely not our own and whose initial stages we would likely lose.

Something like that has happened before. A hundred years ago Theodore Roosevelt had warned Americans that, if we wanted peace in the Pacific, we should either withdraw from the Philippines or build a navy that Japan must respect. We did neither. Instead, US policy consisted of sonorous moral commitments to peace and good order, coupled with an increasingly hollow military: the unbridled tongue and the unready hand. The American people paid the price in blood.

Balancing ends and means has ever been the essence of practical wisdom in international affairs. Arguably the only sensible thing that President Obama has said regarding international affairs – whether he meant it is beside the point – is that America will not again engage in occupations. That was another of the excuses he gave for reducing the US Army. But if the US military will not be good for that bad purpose, for what will it be good? Certainly, Obama’s emphasis on “special forces” and “cyber security” will leave the US military incapable of dealing with serious adversaries, anywhere.

No matter. On Friday, February 28 Barack Obama told the world that the United States government is “deeply concerned” by “reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside Ukraine.” He warned Russia not to interfere in Ukraine and threatened that if it does, “there will be costs.” Given the imbalance between this Administration’s tongue and its hand, Americans and Ukrainians have more to fear than does Vladimir Putin.

Angelo M. Codevilla

Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University. He served as a U.S. Senate Staff member dealing with oversight of the intelligence services. His book Peace Among Ourselves and With All Nations is forthcoming from Hoover Institution Press.

[GOPJ]

These men will not be deterred by the disapproval of their peers, the weight of world opinion or even disinvestment by Silicon Valley companies. They are concerned primarily with maintaining their holds on power. Jeff - this is worth reading. Seems not all people who write for the Washington Post live in Unicorn land every second of every day... There are parts of this piece that make sense.

[4Liberty]

[Hardastarboard]

His entire life is an elaborate fabrication.

As opposed to Bill Clinton whose life has been one elaborate fornication. :-)

[Bigg Red]

More like the one that the communists and soros have been training to be inserted here.

***
Exactly.

[TigersEye]

LOL

Then there was Jimmuh Cawtuh whose life has been one long rabid rabbit attack!

[McGruff]

My people love me.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

China has bullied the Philippines and unilaterally staked claims to wide swaths of international air space and sea lanes as it continues a rapid and technologically impressive military buildup. Arguably, it has paid a price in the nervousness of its neighbors, who are desperate for the United States to play a balancing role in the region. But none of those neighbors feel confident that the United States can be counted on . . . As Mr. Putin ponders whether to advance further — into eastern Ukraine, say — he will measure the seriousness of U.S. and allied actions, not their statements. China, pondering its next steps in the East China Sea, will do the same. Sadly, that’s the nature of the century we’re living in.

As we grow weaker..

I have long believed that Deng's reforms and "[scientific] socialism with Chinese characteristics" is modeled after Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP). The Chinese Communist Party did it right though.. they and their families became billionaires. The Bolshevik dopes stuck with scientific socialism (Marxism) and ended NEP after a few years.

NEP was immediately after the Revolution. The Bolsheviks desperately needed to get a working economy and they permitted "Nepmen" the freedom to engage in free enterprise.

They also invited the likes of Henry Ford to build factories, I believe. (Lenin called 'em useful idiots). Soon the economy was going well and the Bolsheviks were safely in charge. Time to finish the Plan.. I believe that was to seize the useful idiots' assets and dispose of the Nepmen.

I can see where Red China is getting close to that part of Deng's version of NEP. Who's going to stop them from seizing assets under the kind of authority that has been exercised right here in the U.S.? Even if when the Reds use lies.. how is that different from Obama BTW?

The commies will still have the factories. What difference will it make to those who love that cheap stuff from Red China? The Communists can put the useful idiots on a slow boat back to America -- in one of the hundreds of thousands of cargo containers.

[ScottinVA]

But of course the gaggle of journos at the WaPo will never, ever, ever connect their chosen one next in line for the Presidency, Hillary Clinton, to Obama’s fantasy-filled foreign policy.

[The Duke]

Moon beans, skittles, rainbows, unicorns ... yadda yadda yadda. It’s all good!

[LeoWindhorse]

there needs to be a revolution in this country and I am talking ‘old school’

[rollo tomasi]

President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy

So are Obama's, along with fellow Democrat's, and Statist Republican's domestic policies.

[matt04]

To the Golf course! Maybe a post-golf minimum wage speech a thousand miles away.

[NFHale]

“...Actually, he’s who the communists/socialists have been waiting and planning for...”

He’s the wet dream-come-true they’ve had for 85 years or so.

[GeronL]

and this is coming from the WAPO??

[GeronL]

yeppers

[Redcloak]

I thought we weren’t allowed to post material from The Onion.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

Obama and his regime can be summed up in a few words, esp. those describing his advisors and policies:

COMMIES
CRAZIES
CORRUPT
CRONIES
COWARDS

And they are not mutually exclusive. One person can be any or all of them.

Does anyone know of any Obama advisor (in a serious policy making position), who is not one of the above?

Cass Sunstein and his wife Samantha Powers?
Susan Rice?
Brennan CIA
Dempsey - JCS
Anita Dunn - maoist
Valerie Jarrett - color me red and ambitious(Yon Valerie has a lean and hungry look!)
Donilon - Foreign policy advisor
Mabus - Secy of Navy, the Pantywaist of the Ocean
Pelosi - RICH BITCH, Delusional beyond belief
Reid - Crook, traitor, and demented; so’s his family
Schumer - Not enough prejorative words in the diction to describe this scumbag wackjob
Holdren - Makes Charlie Manson seem sane
Holder - Racist in a suit

[Jimmy Valentine]

This from the newspaper that has been kissing his behind and running cover for him for five years