Bret Stephens' Call for Robust U.S. Foreign Policy

[Valin]

Real clear Politics:

Peter Berkowitz

November 16, 2014

 

The disarray of American foreign policy has perilous consequences that are global in reach.

 

A brief glance reveals numerous setbacks. President Obama's half-hearted surge in Afghanistan permitted the Taliban to regroup. His vaunted “reset” with Russia did not prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from seizing the Crimean Peninsula and marching into Eastern Ukraine. It might have encouraged him. Obama's high-profile pivot to Asia, carried out by means of ambivalent gestures and toothless diplomacy, has left both an increasingly defiant China and nervous regional rivals baffled about American intentions.

 

(Snip)

Is there a pattern or unifying conviction that underlies such disarray?

 

Yes says Bret Stephens, the Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist. In "America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder," he argues that the many debacles of the last six years -- with the striking exception of the White House's dogged intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- are tied together by Obama's determination to scale back America's global responsibilities. "America's retreat -- or what the Obama administration prefers to call 'retrenchment' -- is the central fact of this decade, just as the war on terror was the central fact of the last decade," contends Stephens. It is setting the stage for far worse.

 

The retreat doctrine, which demands that America do much less to solve the world's problems and much more to deal with America's problems, enjoys bipartisan support. "America is not the world's policeman," declared Obama in September 2013. This echoes Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul's earlier statement that "America's mission should always be to keep the peace, not to police the world."

 

(Snip)

 

[Valin]

Yes, America Should Be the World’s Policeman

Bush did too much and Obama too little—but a ‘broken-windows’ model of U.S. foreign policy can be just right

Bret Stephens

Nov. 15, 2014

 

When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, Americans must sometimes feel like Goldilocks in the three bears’ house. The porridge that was President George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda”—promising democracy for everyone from Karachi to Casablanca—was too hot. The mush that has been President Barack Obama ’s foreign policy—heavy on rhetoric about resets, pivots and engagement but weak in execution and deeply ambivalent about the uses of U.S. power—is too cold.

 

What we need instead, as the fairy tale has it, is a foreign policy that is just right—neither too ambitious nor too quiescent, forceful when necessary but mindful that we must not exhaust ourselves in utopian quests to heal crippled societies.

 

The U.S. finds itself today in a post-Cold War global order under immense strain, even in partial collapse. Four Arab states have unraveled since 2011. The European Union stumbles from recession to recession, with each downturn calling into question the future of the common currency and even the union itself. In Asia, China has proved to be, by turns, assertive, reckless and insecure. Russia seeks to dominate its neighbors through local proxies, dirty tricks and even outright conquest. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and Iran’s effort to develop one tempt their neighbors to start nuclear programs of their own. And even as the core of al Qaeda fades in importance, its jihadist offshoots, including Islamic State, are metastasizing elsewhere.

 

As for the U.S., the sour experience of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has generated a deep—and bipartisan—reluctance to interfere in foreign conflicts, on the view that our interventions will exact a high price in blood and treasure for uncertain strategic gains. One result is that aggressive regimes seem to think that they can pursue their territorial or strategic ambitions without much fear of a decisive U.S. response. Another is that many of our traditional allies, from Israel to Saudi Arabia to Japan, are quietly beginning to explore other options as the old guarantees of the postwar Pax Americana no longer seem as secure as they once were.

 

(Snip)

[Draggingtree]

Wanted: A Postwar Policy

 

Republicans and Democrats alike are running out of foreign-policy options. It's time to start anew.

 

By TAC STAFF • November 4, 2015

Lessons are learned slowly in politics, and nowhere is this more true than in foreign policy. Thus the Democratic Party is poised to nominate for president a woman who as a senator voted for the Iraq War and as secretary of state was responsible in large measure for the disastrous U.S. involvement in Libya. The Republican 2016 aspirants, meanwhile, have figured out that claiming the Iraq War was a success won’t help them win even relatively hawkish GOP primary voters—yet most talk as if new confrontations with Iran, one side or another of the Syrian civil war, Russia, or China present no hazards worth worrying about. They are as gung-ho for the next war as any neoconservative was for the Iraq invasion.

 

But on the margins are signs that change is indeed coming to American foreign policy, however slowly. Among Hillary Clinton’s challengers in the Democratic contest are a former Republican senator, Lincoln Chafee, who unlike Mrs. Clinton actually voted against the Iraq War; http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/wanted-a-postwar-policy/

[Valin]

Wanted: A Postwar Policy

 

Republicans and Democrats alike are running out of foreign-policy options. It's time to start anew.

 

By TAC STAFF • November 4, 2015

 

 

I missed the part where the New (and supposedly improved) foreign policy option was put forth? Unless returning to isolationism is considered New...and supposedly improved. imperial “exceptionalism.”? Give me a break. Someone has to be the leading military/economic/political power in the world, who would the TAC prefer it to be China, Russia, India? Not me, I like being at the top of the food chain....and I suspect so do most of the nations of the world.

[Draggingtree]

 

Wanted: A Postwar Policy

 

Republicans and Democrats alike are running out of foreign-policy options. It's time to start anew.

 

By TAC STAFF • November 4, 2015

 

 

I missed the part where the New (and supposedly improved) foreign policy option was put forth? Unless returning to isolationism is considered New...and supposedly improved. imperial “exceptionalism.”? Give me a break. Someone has to be the leading military/economic/political power in the world, who would the TAC prefer it to be China, Russia, India? Not me, I like being at the top of the food chain....and I suspect so do most of the nations of the world.

 

I just new you would like the article

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

Like is not exactly the word I would use. New Ideas? There really aren't any New Ideas, not after 6,000 years. There are only recycled Old Ideas. And Isolationism is one of the worst.

 

“You may not be interested in war the world, but war the world is interested in you.” ― Leon Trotsky

[Draggingtree]

@Draggingtree

 

Like is not exactly the word I would use. New Ideas? There really aren't any New Ideas, not after 6,000 years. There are only recycled Old Ideas. And Isolationism is one of the worst.

 

“You may not be interested in war the world, but war the world is interested in you.” ― Leon Trotsky

If you look at the wording its seams like our buddy Pat Buchanan wrote this article

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

He was one of the founders of TAC.