Krauthammer says that Hagel's selection broadcasts our president's goal of retreating from the world's problems:
Hagel himself doesn’t matter. He won’t make foreign policy. Obama will run it out of the White House even more tightly than he did in the first term. Hagel’s importance is the message his nomination sends about where Obama wants to go. The lessons are being duly drawn. ...
The rest of the world can see coming the Pentagon downsizing — and the inevitable, commensurate decline of U.S. power. Pacific Rim countries will have to rethink reliance on the counterbalance of the U.S. Navy and consider acquiescence to Chinese regional hegemony. Arab countries will understand that the current rapid decline of post-Kissinger U.S. dominance in the region is not cyclical but intended to become permanent.
Indeed. Hagel will make sure we are flexible enough to curl up in a fetal position and hope the world's problems pass us by.
I guess we will have the opportunity to see whether it is true as the global left argues that we cause the world's problems rather than being the source of the only power trying to contain and resolve those problems.
We are truly and royally bucked.
