A pretty simple test
Tunku Varadarajan discusses the policies of President Obama in the Daily Beast:
Barack Obama has discarded his predecessor’s big stick — the wielding of which should have confirmed the flaws not of big sticks but of his predecessor — and replaced it with a mission of almost messianic outreach to our foes and most adamant competitors (while, at the same time, snubbing allies like Britain, Israel and India; Robert Kagan has a doughty essay on this in The Washington Post.)
Observing Obama’s foreign policy, one comes away with the impression that he is profoundly embarrassed by American exceptionalism: We are a country like any other, and let no one tell us otherwise. He also views America’s international decline as irreversible: His instinctive response is to accommodate the U.S. to the forces that have led to this decline, since to resist them would not merely be futile, but an affront to the multi-polar sensibilities of all those who, in foreign chanceries and international institutions, watch America closely for any trace of unilateralist recidivism. (Of course, it is OK to be unilateralist in the formal renunciation of strategic options, as happens with any nuclear self-denial; otherwise, multinational solidarity is always to be preferred, even when it leads to the backing of anti-American forces, as has happened in Honduras.)
In the Obama narrative, America has been a reckless source of trouble for the world because of its arrogant interventionism. Obama’s solution, in the words of Charles Hill, a professor at Yale, is the following: “Close out the wars, disengage, and distance ourselves in order to carry out the real objective: the achievement of a European-style welfare state. Just as Reagan downsized government by starving it through budget cuts, Obama will downsize the military-industrial complex by directing so much money into health care, environ-o-care, etc., that we, like the Europeans, will have no funds available to maintain world power. This will gain the confidence of those regimes adversarial to us as they recognize we will no longer be a threat to them and that we will acquiesce in their maintenance of power over their people.” All will be well with the world.
Many people have written that Obama is the anti-Reagan. It does seem that if you invert Ronald Reagan’s policy response to taxes, American exceptionalism, opposition to totalitarian regimes, US military superiority, etc., you get something like Obama’s policies. (Meanwhile, countries like Iran taunt Obama as an “inexperienced amateur,” perhaps to encourage the President to make further conciliatory gestures to the awful regime.)
April 8th, 2010 at 7:57 am
The next question is there any role for Federal politics within the United States? If the USA follows the European model, the role of the various States should be enhanced.
That seems to play into the Tea Party Playbook…
April 8th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Ronald Reagan himself said, “The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas-a trial of spiritual resolve: the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.” And, in his 1984 State of the Union Address, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” Ronald Reagan regarded nuclear weapons, according to Nancy, as “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.”