"World-Weary" by David Remnick at the New Yorker

[applegrove]

World-Weary

by David Remnick at the New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/world-weary

"SNIP......................




After six years in office, Obama broadcasts his world-weariness with wan gestures and pauses, with loose moments in the White House press room. The world has stubbornly denied him his ambition to transcend its cruelties, pivot smartly to the East, and “do some nation-building here at home.” Obama’s halting cool at the lectern now reads too often as weakness, and when he protests against the charges of weakness he can seem just tired. As the Middle East disintegrates and a vengeful cynic in the Kremlin invades his neighbor, Obama has offered no full and clarifying foreign-policy vision.

His opponents and would-be successors at home have seized the chance to peashoot from the sidelines. What do they offer? Unchastened by their many past misjudgments, John McCain and Lindsey Graham go on proposing escalations, aggressions, and regime changes. Rand Paul, who will likely run for President as a stay-at-home Republican, went to Guatemala recently and performed eye surgeries as a means of displaying his foreign-policy bona fides. Was Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s ophthalmologist-in-chief, impressed?

Chris Christie insists on the efficacy of big men and tough talk—the Great Jersey Guy theory of history. Recently, he suggested that Vladimir Putin would not dare sponsor the bloody destabilization of Ukraine were Christie in charge. “I don’t believe, given who I am, that he would make the same judgment,” Christie said at a meeting of Republican activists. “Let’s leave it at that.” Christie is trying to bone up on world affairs by reading Kenneth Adelman’s book on Ronald Reagan. Adelman was the cheerful adviser to Donald Rumsfeld who insisted that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003, would be a “cakewalk.” Rick Perry, another 2016 hopeful, took a more parochial view of the geostrategic crisis when he suggested that Obama had blithely overlooked the “very real possibility” that the black-hooded executioners from the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham had already infiltrated the United States by way of the Mexican border. (According to Michael Barbaro, of the Times, this piece of intelligence elicited “eye rolls” from Pentagon officials.)

....................

This is not a foreign policy that offers the satisfactions of self-expression; it lacks the snarl and the swagger that Obama’s domestic rivals yearn for. But, halfway through this President’s second term, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program have, at last, a realistic chance for success. Russia’s recent aggressions in eastern Ukraine may end in an uneasy truce. The gains have been unshowy and incremental. But when your aim is to conduct a responsive and responsible foreign policy, the avoidance of stupid things is often the avoidance of bloodshed and unforeseen strife. History suggests that it is not a mantra to be derided or dismissed.

.......................SNIP"

[Shrike47]

1. I don't know what's worse, Christie the blowhard or Perry the idiot.

[applegrove]

2. The clown car is circling that is for sure.