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For me, it provided a lot of clarity to some of his decisions the past few years. It was interesting to read how many of his decisions regarding foreign policy have gone against the wishes of his close advisors. He's really stuck to his beliefs; time will tell whether that makes him obstinate or categorically scrupulous.
Quote:
Obama has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about America’s role in it. The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be little an American president could do to make it a better place. The third is that the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power. The fourth is that the world cannot afford to see the diminishment of U.S. power. Just as the leaders of several American allies have found Obama’s leadership inadequate to the tasks before him, he himself has found world leadership wanting: global partners who often lack the vision and the will to spend political capital in pursuit of broad, progressive goals, and adversaries who are not, in his mind, as rational as he is. Obama believes that history has sides, and that America’s adversaries—and some of its putative allies—have situated themselves on the wrong one, a place where tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and militarism still flourish. What they don’t understand is that history is bending in his direction.
“The central argument is that by keeping America from immersing itself in the crises of the Middle East, the foreign-policy establishment believes that the president is precipitating our decline,” Ben Rhodes told me. “But the president himself takes the opposite view, which is that overextension in the Middle East will ultimately harm our economy, harm our ability to look for other opportunities and to deal with other challenges, and, most important, endanger the lives of American service members for reasons that are not in the direct American national-security interest.”
If you are a supporter of the president, his strategy makes eminent sense: Double down in those parts of the world where success is plausible, and limit America’s exposure to the rest. His critics believe, however, that problems like those presented by the Middle East don’t solve themselves—that, without American intervention, they metastasize.
At the moment, Syria, where history appears to be bending toward greater chaos, poses the most direct challenge to the president’s worldview.
_________________ I'll be the one in the lobby in the green fuck me shirt. The green one.
HITECH has been truly transformative. It has produced 20 years worth of essential EHR standardization in just a fraction of that time, has laid the groundwork for incredible leaps in healthcare safety, and I consider it a classic example of "Democrats letting other people tell their story" that it barely gets mentioned when people talk about Obama's healthcare reform.
Joined: Tue September 24, 2013 5:56 pm Posts: 47017 Location: In the oatmeal aisle wearing a Shellac shirt
Spent the day with Mrs. Trag's uncle yesterday, who has a pretty clear anti-government manifesto; his beliefs are slowly morphing into something approaching anarchy. And even he likes Obama. "I believe he's a good man with good intentions, and don't understand why more of the politicians didn't rally around a guy who was obviously trying to create positive change."
Spent the day with Mrs. Trag's uncle yesterday, who has a pretty clear anti-government manifesto; his beliefs are slowly morphing into something approaching anarchy. And even he likes Obama. "I believe he's a good man with good intentions, and don't understand why more of the politicians didn't rally around a guy who was obviously trying to create positive change."
Joined: Tue September 24, 2013 5:56 pm Posts: 47017 Location: In the oatmeal aisle wearing a Shellac shirt
Strat wrote:
tragabigzanda wrote:
Spent the day with Mrs. Trag's uncle yesterday, who has a pretty clear anti-government manifesto; his beliefs are slowly morphing into something approaching anarchy. And even he likes Obama. "I believe he's a good man with good intentions, and don't understand why more of the politicians didn't rally around a guy who was obviously trying to create positive change."
Joined: Tue September 24, 2013 5:56 pm Posts: 47017 Location: In the oatmeal aisle wearing a Shellac shirt
My hunch is that he's strategizing and rallying the troops without sounding any alarms. Between last-minute executive actions, working on the Russia thing, and getting the Dems in Congress on the same page about how to dig in for the next four years, I can't imagine he's resting on his laurels. It's just not a fortuitous time for him to be out politicking or championing a cause.
Joined: Sun September 15, 2013 5:50 am Posts: 22293
Kaius wrote:
He really seems to have thrown in the towel.
he kind of seemed to throw in the towel like 6 months after getting re-elected
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