The year-and-a-half long streak of me disagreeing with Barack Obama has finally ended.
Since you're so precise in your dating, would you care to share the thing he said a year and a half ago with which you also agreed? Just a point of curiosity.
Even if what Obama is saying is nothing more than political hooey, I'd rather he spout this kind of political hooey, than some sabre-rattling nonsense past US presidents have blurted out.
Yes, I agree. The kind of hooey matters. America has to start working out a new kind of conceptualization of the relation between our military power and world affairs. If this hooey is enough to start that conversation, it will be enough for me.
We have enough power to be "the world's policeman" in
any country that might benefit from such policing (or in which
we might benefit from such policing) but not in
all countries that might. Suspending for a moment the question of whether we should, we can't do anything in Ukraine precisely because we've exhausted ourselves in Iraq and Afganistan lately.
The post-Cold-war world is multilateral. Iraq was as much a desperate effort to continue to imagine it as bilateral as it was anything else. The story of foreign affairs in Obama's presidency has been the story of too dang many fires to stamp out, i.e. the multilateral world asserting itself as collectively beyond the military management of the U.S. Time we started working to devise a new standard.
Or reassert an old one. All we would really need is the protections the Constitution already establishes. Congress should develop some backbone, and insist on really voting on whether to fund a particular war. Not the "Prez sent in troops on his authority as commander in chief, so I guess we have to write a blank check" thinking that has prevailed of late. The American people will happily vote to fund any war where America's interests are genuinely threatened.
<steps off soapbox>
does it extend to Michealle too...
