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James Kirchick says this administration is worse than Carter’s.
… rather than respond to the collapsing world order by supporting our allies and undermining our adversaries, the Obama administration dithers. It is an indication of just how worrisome the situation is that many in Washington are pining for the resolve and fortitude of Jimmy Carter.
For months, the beleaguered Ukrainians have requested the most basic of military aid. The administration sends Meals Ready to Eat. Even hard-hitting, “sectoral” sanctions aimed at the Russian economy are viewed as too provocative.
Last year, Obama declared a “red line” on Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people. Assad’s deployment of such weapons, the world was told, would constitute the sort of breach of international law and norms requiring an American response.
When Assad did use such weapons, Washington allowed itself to be co-opted into a farcical deal — proposed by that most altruistic of world leaders, Russian President Vladimir Putin — that saw the purported removal of Assad’s chemical arsenal. The message from Washington to Assad: You can continue murdering your people en masse and destabilizing the entire Middle East, but just do so using conventional weapons.
But even that solution was full of holes. Days ago, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons announced that evidence it has gathered from the field “lends credence to the view that toxic chemicals, most likely pulmonary irritating agents such as chlorine, have been used” against civilians. Two senior administration officials working on Syria, special advisor for transition Fred Hof and Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, resigned their posts rather than continue participating in this charade.
Few take America, least of all Secretary of State John Kerry, at its word anymore. Earlier this week, Kerry demanded that Russia urge separatists in Ukraine to disarm “within the next hours, literally.”
Or what? This empty threat followed months of similar reprimands from Washington. …
John Fund posts on Kirchick’s article.
As someone who actually lived through the dreary declinism of the Carter era, it’s hard to imagine a president could put in a weaker and more spineless performance in foreign policy.
But James Kirchick of the Foreign Policy Initiative lays out the case that Barack Obama has taken the trophy of incompetence abroad from Jimmy Carter.
A particularly pungent quote
Global instability is on the rise and faith in America’s stabilizing presence is on the decline, and all we have from Washington are empty, millennial-friendly buzz phrases. “Leading from behind” was how one, too-clever-by-half administration official termed Obama’s global strategy. Hitting “singles” and “doubles” is Obama’s own, jocular assessment of his foreign policy. And now, “Don’t do stupid s—” is the mantra being repeated throughout the halls of the White House and State Department.
“Don’t do anything at all” seems more apt a description of this administration’s approach. …
Jennifer Rubin calls it a “perfect storm of foreign policy incompetence.”
… Convinced al-Qaeda was dead, insistent we could retreat from the world and determined to treat terrorism as a series of criminal justice matters, the White House’s perfect storm of foreign policy incompetence has made for a far more dangerous and unstable Middle East than the one they found in 2009. And those who helped implement or cheered these moves and misjudgments will have a lot to answer for. It remains to be seen whether and at what cost (human and financial) we can reverse the terrorists’ momentum and re-establish U.S. influence in the region.
Foreign policy failures are perfectly matched with domestic failure. Joel Kotkin posts on the alliance between government and the 1%. Of course this is not what the president had in mind. He said he wanted to punish the 1% with taxes to pay for middle class benefits. But, since the government always f**ks up achieving goals, the exact opposite is the result.
Thanks to their cozy relationship with the Obama administration, a new class of super-wealthy oligarchs keeps getting more powerful while the country’s middle class shrinks.
When our current President was elected, many progressives saw the dawning of a new epoch, a more egalitarian and more just Age of Obama. Instead we have witnessed the emergence of the Age of Oligarchy.
The outlines of this new epoch are clear in numerous ways. There is the diminished role for small business, greater concentration of financial assets, and a troubling decline in home ownership. On a cultural level, there is a general malaise about the prospect for upward mobility for future generations.
Not everyone is suffering in this new age. For the entitled few, these have been the best of times. With ever more concentration of key industries, ever greater advantage of capital over labor, and soaring real estate values in swanky places such as Manhattan or San Francisco which , as one journalist put it, constitute “vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.” The top hundred firms on the Fortune 500 list has revenues, in adjusted dollars, eight times those during the supposed big-business heyday of the 1960s.
This shift towards oligarchy well precedes President Obama’s tenure. It was born from a confluence of forces: globalization, the financialization of the economy, and the shift towards digital technology. Obama is not entirely to blame, it is more than a bit ironic that these measurements have worsened under an Administration that has proclaimed income inequality abhorrent. …
In an article titled “Barney Fife Meets Delta Force,” Charles Cooke reports on the military equipment finding its way to public safety goobers.
… Historians looking back at this period in America’s development will consider it to be profoundly odd that at the exact moment when violent crime hit a 50-year low, the nation’s police departments began to gear up as if the country were expecting invasion — and, on occasion, to behave as if one were underway. The ACLU reported recently that SWAT teams in the United States conduct around 45,000 raids each year, only 7 percent of which have anything whatsoever to do with the hostage situations with which those teams were assembled to contend. Paramilitary operations, the ACLU concluded, are “happening in about 124 homes every day — or more likely every night” — and four in five of those are performed in order that authorities might “search homes, usually for drugs.” Such raids routinely involve “armored personnel carriers,” “military equipment like battering rams,” and “flashbang grenades.” …