“Never mind the Fed’s taper, it’s the U.S. geopolitical taper that is stirring world anxiety. From Ukraine to Syria to the Pacific, a hands-off foreign policy invites more trouble,” Niall Ferguson writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Obama’s supporters like nothing better than to portray him as the peacemaker to George W. Bush’s warmonger. But it is now almost certain that more people have died violent deaths in the Greater Middle East during this presidency than during the last one.
In a January interview with the New Yorker magazine, the president said something truly stunning. “I don’t really even need George Kennan right now,” he asserted, referring to the late American diplomat and historian whose insights informed the foreign policy of presidents from Franklin Roosevelt on. Yet what Mr. Obama went on to say about his self-assembled strategy for the Middle East makes it clear that a George Kennan is exactly what he needs: someone with the regional expertise and experience to craft a credible strategy for the U.S., as Kennan did when he proposed the “containment” of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s.
So what exactly is the president’s strategy? “It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shiites weren’t intent on killing each other,” the president explained in the New Yorker. “And although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion . . . you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran.”
Moreover, he continued, if only “the Palestinian issue” could be “unwound,” then another “new equilibrium” could be created, allowing Israel to “enter into even an informal alliance with at least normalized diplomatic relations” with the Sunni states. The president has evidently been reading up about international relations and has reached the chapter on the “balance of power.” The trouble with his analysis is that it does not explain why any of the interested parties should sign up for his balancing act.
Later in Ferguson’s article, he quotes Henry Kissinger, whose boss occasionally talked to the paintings in the White House during his darkest hours, if Woodward and Bernstein are to be believed. Today, the paintings appear to be speaking to Mr. Obama:
Feel free to leave your thoughts on what President Reagan is saying to his would-be successor in the comments.
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