OBAMA: “WHAT I’M NOT INTERESTED IN DOING IS POSING OR PURSUING SOME NOTION OF AMERICAN LEADERSHIP OR AMERICA WINNING:”

Obama’s tone during Monday’s press conference alternated between defensive and disinterested. The two-term Democratic president repeatedly insisted that his strategy was working and scoffed at demands to change his plan to confront and defeat ISIS.

“What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and to protect the people in the region who are getting killed and to protect our allies and people like France,” Obama said. “I’m too busy for that.”

There’s video of Obama’s chilling words in a C-SPAN clip at the Federalist. They’re the president’s equivalent of Carter’s malaise speech, only this time concerning real war, not its moral equivalent, which he and most Democrats view global warming. (And which Carter similarly viewed what in the 1970s was dubbed “the energy crisis.”)

Contrast this with a very different geopolitical strategy against totalitarianism. As Power Line’s Steve Hayward wrote in The Age of Reagan Volume II: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989, published in 1989:

Reagan wanted to do much more than simply return to a robust anti-Communist foreign policy; he had spoken openly to his aides of wanting to win the Cold War, a hitherto unthinkable notion. Most notably, he told his future national security adviser, Richard Allen, sometime in 1979 that his view of the Cold War was simple: “We win, they lose. What do you think of that?” Reagan rejected coexistence and agreed with the orthodox conservative view that containment was a losing strategy in the face of determined revolutionists. Following Lincoln’s policy on slavery, Reagan wanted to place Communism on the course of ultimate extinction.

I know which strategy I prefer. How about you? (And hey, remember when Time magazine told us that Reagan would approve of Obama?)

Related: “If he hated terrorists half as much as he hates Republicans then maybe ISIS wouldn’t control half the middle east.”