Obama Will Turn America into a Wimp

It’s no big revelation that often, the pendulum swings from one side to the other, rather than a moderate middle. It is obvious, even to his own party, that Bush swung the neo-con preemptive (Bush Doctrine) policy too far, too fast. Foreign policy, handled correctly, is like a long oil tanker, it takes time to turn it around. Foreign policy turned on a dime leaves a lot of collateral damage. Bush turned our foreign policy, after Clinton, on a dime.

Now, however, at this time, it seems Obama will win the election in November, less any surprises to the negative of Obama or the plus of McCain. Obama believes he is reading the American will that America be accepted again as a positive actor in the world community. LNR fears Obama will practice foreign policy based on American domestic politics. That is wrong, Obama will end up pushing the pendulum the other way- too far- turning America into an international wimp- as we were in the Jimmy Carter years.

As in business, in politics- you CAN’T admit you were wrong, you CAN’T back down, even if your position is untenable or just plain wrong. You must carefully maneuver your way out to new positions, and even with that, you cannot stand down to challengers. American policy vis-à-vis North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela must be hard line without concessions. The real world is “realpolitik” and if you create power vacuums by being ‘nice’ and ‘understanding’ you will be crushed by upstarts ready to fill the vacuum- that’s life, that’s history. For example, with Iraq, once bad intelligence about WMD’s was identified, the U.S. had a window of opportunity to leave with the Iraqi baathist party in control, we did not. In the case that we remained after that window of opportunity closed, we should have then injected the resources required to crush the insurgency and appoint- not elect, a coalition government of national unity. The resources needed to win at that point would have required a draft- a good President, no matter the political damage, would have called for a draft so that we could put 400-500,000 soldiers on the ground. Our military was NOT winning- and your strategy was clear- bring in reinforcements- yet, a weak President just let the situation rot- a crime against our fallen troops, a crime against Iraq.
Obama, if he indeed wins, will “blink” in the real life game of realpolitik. It will end up, just as Joe Biden said correctly yesterday, Obama, if we wins, will be an INVITATION for a global crisis – a challenge to America.