If the Iran nuclear deal holds and becomes a lasting legacy (knock on wood)

[True Blue Door]

61. I'm sorry, I just can't agree with that.

The Clinton administration's military policies were incoherent, and based largely on flailing responses in one direction or another to public opinion polls and Republican trolling. If they wanted to do something and didn't feel they had the political support, instead of building the support or just holding off, they would do something half-assed and then walk away the moment it became inconvenient.

And if they didn't want to do something but were hounded by Republicans over it, they would again do it half-assed instead of behaving authoritatively and saying "No, we're doing it this way" as Obama switched the US stance vis-a-vis Iran over from confrontation to diplomacy.

The Carter administration was praiseworthy in diplomacy, but it was extremely militarily negligent. Instead of cleaning up the messes he inherited, Carter mostly washed his hands of them and pretended they weren't there - which just conceded the agenda to shadier characters in the administration like Brzezinski, who was every bit the sonofabitch as Kissinger, and was the author of not only the taliban in Afghanistan but the descent of the Iranian monarchy into outright dictatorship.

Granted, Carter was an extremely excellent facilitator of third-party diplomacy, and the Camp David Accords are a colossal historic achievement, but the order of the day where direct US policy was concerned was negligence. The world went from the US being the direct author of global chaos under Nixon to being its passive spectator (or shadow instigator) under Carter.

There's peaceful, and there's weak. Nixon thought peacefulness was weak, Carter that weakness was peace. Obviously neither is true. The 1970s were a blood-soaked Dark Age for much of the world as a result of both sets of policies, with fatality levels that make everything going on today look trivial.