are sanity The Obama administration’s pitch is that America is doing a lot globally through non-military means and that isolationism or withdrawal from international commitments is not its intention. The investment Obama has made in diplomatic and political solutions to crises such as Ukraine, the Israel-Palestine dispute, the Iran nuclear imbroglio and the East Asia naval tensions may or may not yield desired breakthroughs. But they are instances where he tried to present himself as a statesman. As an African American, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a former community organizer, Obama was expected by his progressive followers to press for far-ranging limits on the US military industrial complex and on NATO’s aggressive eastward expansion. These hopes remain unfulfilled because every American president inherits certain entrenched structures against which he cannot revolt. If the Left wing’s grudge with Obama is based on unfulfilled aspirations, the Right wing’s cheap shots at Obama for “taking a nap” (Republican House Speaker John Boehner on the president’s Iraq policy), sitting on his haunches, and permitting American supremacy of the world to slip away are driven by misguided belief that the US has unlimited capability to be the sole arbiter of the international system.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 20:06:46 +0000