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Yesterday, without quite knowing it, Roger Cohen nominated another
candidate for the Now They Tell Us Award.
The candidate: Vali Nasr a former Obama administration
foreign policy hand, now dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies. Given his credentials, Nasr's indictment bears
close attention.
Nasr’s new book has not yet been published, but Roger Cohen
has summarized its central points clearly and cogently:
In a
book called “The Dispensable Nation,” to be published in April, Nasr delivers a
devastating portrait of a first-term foreign policy that shunned the tough
choices of real diplomacy, often descended into pettiness, and was controlled
“by a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers.”
He quotes Nasr's indictment of Obama administration foreign
policy:
It is
not going too far to say that American foreign policy has become completely
subservient to tactical domestic political considerations.
As for the decline of American influence in the world, the fault,
Nasr says, lies in a failure of American leadership.
Cohen describes the book’s perspective:
… it
paints a persuasive picture of an American decline driven not so much by the
inevitable rise of other powers as by “inconsistency” that has “cast doubt on
our leadership.”
An administration that bases its foreign policy on domestic
political considerations will not really have a foreign policy. Inconsistent describes it nicely.
Nasr’s view, via Cohen:
Nowhere
was this inconsistency more evident than in Afghanistan. Obama doubled-down by
committing tens of thousands more troops to show he was no wimp, only to set a
date for a drawdown to show he was no warmonger. Marines died; few cared.
Nasr is, of course, a liberal. He defends his old boss
Holbrooke and is at special pains to exculpate Hillary Clinton for all of the
foreign policy inconsistencies that have plagued the Obama administration.
By saying that foreign policy was run out of the White House
and that it specifically marginalized Hillary Clinton, Nasr is ensuring that,
when the next foreign policy debacle arises, the former Secretary of State will
emerge unscathed.
4 comments:
Only on the liberal side. If that. Hillary! still has other enemies.
Hillary is a marketed politician. She has been around a long time and the majority are familiar with her name. She will probably never be properly measured, like most high profile politicians until she is gone.
Perhaps Hilary will explain why a woman was sent into the Middle East as the mouth piece for President Obama. This part of the Middle East must have seen this as an American slap in the face.
Jonana:
They raped Logan. They raped Stevens. For good measure, they raped Gaddafi.
They perceive everything and everyone as a slap in their face. America just happened to have a big hand and focused their attention.
To be fair, they could not ignore Obama's meddling throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It's as if he wanted and wants to provoke them to action.
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