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Obama Stands Aloof from America's Four Foreign Policy Traditions

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Photo Credit: LifeNews President Obama’s speech at the United Nations last week was “an important turning point in American foreign policy — and in his presidency.” That’s the verdict of Brookings Institution scholar and former Clinton White House aide William Galston, a Democrat who has not been an unqualified admirer of this Democratic president’s foreign policy.

Whether Obama’s decision to launch air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Khorasan terrorists is a turning point, it was at least a move in the direction of a tradition in American foreign policy that has been conspicuously lacking in his administration.

That tradition was christened by Walter Russell Mead in his 2001 book Special Providence as the Jacksonian Impulse, one of four that have together shaped American foreign policy since the founding of the republic. The others, named after American leaders, are the Hamiltonian, Wilsonian and Jeffersonian traditions.

Jacksonians, like their namesake Andrew Jackson, are generally not much interested in foreign policy. But when Americans are attacked, the respond with righteous fury and a determination to utterly destroy the enemy.

Franklin Roosevelt invoked that tradition when in his Pearl Harbor speech he said, in a line that drew not just applause but whoops and hollers, “The American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.”

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WH: Administration’s Foreign Policy Has Improved ‘Tranquility of The Global Community’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP / Jacquelyn MartinWhite House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday the Obama administration’s foreign policies in a number of areas have enhanced the world’s “tranquility” – a word that raised eyebrows as reporters pointed to situations in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine and the South China Sea.

More than one reporter during Monday’s press briefing referred to a front-page Wall Street Journal article highlighting some of those crises, and citing security strategists as saying “the breadth of global instability now unfolding hasn’t been seen since the late 1970s.”

“How does the White House react to the notion that the president is a bystander to all these crises?” asked Fox News’ Ed Henry, citing the widening gaps between the sides in the Iranian nuclear talks, the conflict in and around Gaza, and the Syrian civil war.

“I think that there have been a number of situations in which you’ve seen this administration intervene in a meaningful way, that has substantially furthered American interests and substantially improved the, uh, you know, the – the tranquility of the global community,” Earnest replied.

ABC News’ Jon Karl quoted Attorney General Eric Holder’s assessment in an interview aired Sunday that the terrorist potential arising from Westerners returning home after fighting in Syria was “more frightening than anything I think I’ve seen as attorney general.”

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Ron Paul: Obama’s Foreign Policy Rhetoric Does Not Match U.S. Actions

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Photo Credit: TownHall President Obama’s recent foreign policy speech, delivered at this year’s West Point graduation ceremony, was a disappointment to anyone who hoped the president might be changing course. The failure of each U.S. intervention thus far in the 21st century might have inspired at least a bit of reflection.

However, the president made it clear that interventionism and American exceptionalism would continue to guide his administration in its final two years. The president said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” adding the dubious claim that “because of American diplomacy and foreign assistance, as well as the sacrifices of our military — more people live under elected governments today than at any time in human history.”

It’s funny he would mention elections. Last week the Syrians held their first multi-candidate presidential election in 50 years. Almost three-quarters of Syrian voters participated, giving President Assad 88 percent of the vote. After three years fighting a foreign-backed insurgency, voting conditions were not optimal. However, despite State Department claims to the contrary, it can no longer be stated that Assad enjoys no popularity in his country. Even former CIA chief Michael Hayden not long ago envisioned Assad winning a fair election in Syria.

But the U.S. government completely rejected the vote in Syria, with Secretary of State John Kerry calling it “a great big zero,” because, as he put it, “you can’t have an election where millions of your people don’t even have an ability to vote.”

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Chinese General Says U.S. Foreign Policy Has ‘Erectile Dysfunction’ Problems

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Photo Credit: APA Chinese general used a regional security conference this weekend to tell a global audience that U.S. rhetoric about the South China Sea risks provoking Beijing.

For the Chinese language audience, the general used language saltier — and perhaps more provocative — words to describe how he feels about U.S. power.

Maj. Gen Zhu Chenghu, a professor at the National Defense University, made the remarks in an interview with Chinese-language Phoenix TV at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore Saturday.

He suggested that if China came to blows with any of its neighbors, the U.S. might not be a reliable ally.

“As U.S. power declines, Washington needs to rely on its allies in order to reach its goal of containing China’s development,” he told the TV station.

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Excuses Excuses

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Photo Credit: NEWSCOMSince 2009, the world has been trying to make sense of America’s foreign and national security policies under Barack Obama. Allies and enemies, historians and scholars, the president’s critics and his supporters—all have struggled to define, or even discern, an Obama Doctrine. So last week, the man optimally positioned to elucidate the president’s vision sought to provide some clarity.

In a rambling, defensive, and disjointed commencement speech at West Point, the president attempted retroactively to impose a framework on his ad hoc and often incoherent foreign policy. He sought to convince his audience—and the world—that he has a vision for America’s role and that it’s working. What we’re seeing today, he argued, is all part of the plan.

That’s a tough sell. Our allies are confused and dispirited, our enemies are unquestionably emboldened. The Russian reset failed. The Asia pivot never happened. The Middle East peace process collapsed. The Syrian leader once embraced as a “reformer” has slaughtered more than 150,000 of his own people. Libya is a mess. Iraq is regressing. Obama’s own top intelligence officials acknowledge that al Qaeda is amassing territory and gaining strength.

Rather than defend or explain these policy failures, the president chose instead to attack critics, real and imaginary. He challenged “critics who think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak,” though no one actually thinks this. He rejected as “naïve and unsustainable” any “strategy that involves invading every country that harbors terrorist networks” despite the fact that there are no advocates for such a strategy.

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Why American Foreign Policy is Headed for Disaster

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Photo Credit: Free Beacon …Watching the strange mix of clumsiness and insouciance with which Barack Obama and John Kerry approach the world, the abstract and aloof manner in which they comment and posture on foreign affairs, it is hard not to recall Hardy’s metaphor of growing dangers distant from the center of civilization. The recent news of a possible terrorist plot against airliners flying to the United States, and of a threat against the U.S. embassy in Uganda, remind us of the durability of the ideology and menace of Islamic terrorism. The ability of non-monarchical Arab governments to control their populations has collapsed, creating an arc of stateless space that begins in Libya and Egypt, is briefly interrupted by the tiny, embattled, belittled, and bullied Jewish State, and extends through Lebanon into Syria and western Iraq.

This is our iceberg. Within its confines murderers and barbarians roam, butchering each other and anyone else who is caught in the crossfire. Within its confines followers of al Qaeda gather and plot. They will not remain within its confines for long, though. Anyone who pays the least attention to the articles inside the New York Times will have noticed leaks by officers of our intelligence agencies, leaks desperately warning that the jihadists have turned their eyes to Europe and to the United States. It is no secret. At the end of last month the Director of National Intelligence told Congress that al Qaeda is no less of a threat than it was when it attacked in 2001.

Our response? The United States has no influence in Egypt, it has left the Syrian dictator more secure, it has left him with his stash of WMD, and it has no pull over Lebanon, no pull over Iraq. The United States is gutting its military, it is pursuing negotiations with Iran whose only point is, in the words of one former Obama official, to “buy time.” It is withdrawing from Afghanistan and leaving it in the hands of the former hosts of al Qaeda, and it is lifting asylum restrictions to make it easier for Syrians with “loose ties” to terrorism to migrate here.

The United States is about to lose strategically important drone bases in Afghanistan, it has found itself out-maneuvered by Vladimir Putin at every turn, its policies toward hotspots in Venezuela and Ukraine seem nonexistent. The policy is to talk above all, to keep talking in Geneva with the Syrians, to keep talking in Vienna with the Iranians, to keep talking in Jerusalem with the Israelis and the Palestinians, no matter that the talk accomplishes nothing, no matter that it drains resources, energy, and personnel that could be put to more constructive use elsewhere. His policy in Syria in tatters, his negotiations with Iran a charade, the secretary of State flew to Indonesia last week to rally the world against the amorphous force of climate change. Why do something about 130,000 dead Syrians, about proliferating weapons of mass destruction, when you can poke fun of those who dissent from the scientific consensus?

The territory over which al Qaeda claims sovereignty is growing, our influence in the Middle East is shrinking, and serious contenders for the American presidency want to make it more difficult for the government to survey the enemy. Our president and his administration interpret these developments, if they interpret them at all, in isolation, as discrete situations, as the inevitable consequences of the post-American world they are so diligently helping to bring into being. “Alien they seemed to be,” Hardy writes. “No mortal eye could see / The intimate welding of their later history.”

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Video: Exiled Egyptian Christian Says U.S. Foreign Policy Is ‘Definition of Insanity’

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Rev. Majed El Shafie declared on TheBlaze TV Friday that “the Arab Spring is a lie” that has turned into a “cold deadly winter,” especially for minorities. He also criticized the U.S. for continually arming radicals in the Middle East, only to be attacked by them later.

The native Egyptian is intimately familiar with the subject, having been tortured and sentenced to death after converting to Christianity at the age of 18. He described how he stole a jet ski and fled to Israel, and how he has since begun the human rights group “One Free World International” that now has 28 branches around the world.

“And that was under the Mubarak regime,” Erick Stakelbeck, author of The Brotherhood: America’s Next Great Enemy, pointed out. “I can’t imagine how it would be under the Muslim Brotherhood!”

“That’s correct,” Shafie responded. “It [would] be one hundred times worse.”

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Al Qaeda Leader Zawahiri: Benghazi Attack Signifies American Weakness

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Following quickly on the heels of the U.S. presidential election, al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri proclaimed that the terror attack against the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghaz indicates that American “awe is lost” in the region. In an audio message addressed to the Somali jihadist group, al-Shabaab, Zawahiri said American influence in the region is floundering due to weakness.

“They were defeated in Iraq and they are withdrawing from Afghanistan and their ambassador in Benghazi was killed and the flags of their embassies were lowered in Cairo and Sanaa (Yemen),” a translation the militant’s message reads in the Long War Journal.

“Their awe is lost and their might is gone and they don’t dare to carry out a new campaign like their past ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Al Qaeda is, of course, along with other militant groups, are still sweeping the Maghreb — in particular, Libya. On Tuesday turmoil reached a fever pitch in Benghazi after a car bomb exploded near a police station late in the day, a police officer told AFP. He added that two of his colleagues were injured in a subsequent gunfight with the primary suspect. The vehicle reportedly belonged to a law enforcement officer and it was believed to have been ignited by a hand grenade or fishing explosives.

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