…it is my view that President Obama has been a nearly flawless foreign policy President.
…with any over-arching foreign policy justifications, like, Why are we there in the first place? What’s our right? Why do we persist? What did they ever do to us?
If one wants to call US foreign policy “flawless,” one needs a half-way decent defense of such questions, no? Is BTD willing to put his implicit foreign policy theories on paper for the rest of us to read? (If I am missing such justifications e.g., 9/11, al Qaeda, WMD, New World Order, please let me know.)
I need to hear some specifics on “flawless [interventionist] foreign policy.” Bring it! BTD has got a Basketball Jones for interventionist foreign policy, and it’s time to bring the ball to the hoop for a slam dunk, or two!
Update
No one can reasonably dispute that the entire industrialized world is crucially dependent on oil, for better or worse. If you’ve ever seen a rat during morphine withdrawal, un-groomed, greasy hair standing on end, teeth-chattering, paw tremors, wet-dog shakes, hyper-stress-responsive to the mildest stimuli, metabolically crashing, you can extrapolate the physiological horrors of morphine withdrawal and multiply them billions of times across humanity to get a sense of what sudden oil withdrawal would be like. There’s nothing pretty about it.
The US has been on escalating doses of oil for a long, long time, feeding our dependency. Obama certainly didn’t invent our foreign policy. It has been US policy for a long time, explicitly since the Carter doctrine and in reality well before that, to meddle aggressively, some would say “defend ourselves” in the oily parts of the world. Given our crucial dependence, it’s not a priori criminally insane. In a state of nature, it would be no different from defending one’s place at the watering hole. Indeed, there are no laws in Nature, and no justifications are required. But we don’t claim to exist in a state of nature. We humans claim to live in a realm of social contracts.
Our foreign policy of defending ourselves (and perhaps others, as well) at the watering hole, however justifiable that may or may not be in the realm of social contracts, recently appears to have morphed into a flat-out “exterminate the brutes” campaign. One could vigorously and convincingly argue that our recent aggressive adventures in the oily parts of the world is demonstrably well outside the bounds of any perceived or known social agreements.
I’d just like to see an intelligent, measured response from someone who sees the policy as flawless.
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genocide.
greed.
hubris.
priceless.
g.
Didn’t he have a previous handle?
out sooner than the rest of the world .. they still have to catch up.
I can sum it up in a sentence:
“Tell the world what they want to hear, then do whatever the fuck we want.”
Of course, I could also add this unnecessary apocrypha: “Keep the world guessing which U.S. is which, and which Barack Obama is which, for as long as possible, by which time, with the grace of God, it will be too late.”
For people for whom platitudes are important, this would be something of an improvement over the last administration, where they did whatever the fuck they wanted without the “tell them what they want to hear” part.
US foreign policy sucks.
is OK with Armando.