Look for America’s Enemies to Take Advantage of Obama’s Last Year

[Geee]

National Review:

Changes of administrations usually mark dicey times in American foreign policy. But transitional hazards will never be greater than in 2016.

Over a span of just a few months in mid 1945, new president Harry Truman lost all trust in Soviet Union strongman Josef Stalin — in a way that Truman’s predecessor, the ailing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never had during nearly four years of World War II.

 

Ensuing American foreign policy jerked from a pragmatic Lend-Lease alliance with a duplicitous Communist superpower to a tense Cold War.

 

President John F. Kennedy was young, idealistic, cocky — and without the military reputation of his predecessor, the much more experienced former general Dwight D. Eisenhower. Soon after JFK’s inauguration in 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev predictably began testing Kennedy’s mettle as commander-in-chief, from Berlin to Cuba.

 

Kennedy’s eventual restoration of American deterrence during the Cuban blockade marked the scariest phase in Cold War history.