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Wednesday, June 18, 2014

The End of Pretending

As the Middle East shudders as we walk away, the Iranians prepare to go nuclear, the Russians push against weakness, and the Chinese seek to exploit new power at our allies' expense, let me revisit a 2009 post of mine on President Obama's view of foreign policy:

Saying that foreign policy is a distant second in priorities for this administration might seem an odd thing to say for a president who has travelled abroad so much already.

But it makes sense if you think of the trips abroad as efforts to disengage from foes and retreat a bit by giving our foes what they want in order to buy time to pass domestic legislation.

Understand that when you retreat, it takes a while for an enemy to pursue you and fill the vacuum. And that time it takes for the enemy to re-engage will surely be much quieter.

And if you want to, you can argue that the period of quiet while the enemy approaches is actually "peace." It isn't peace, but you can pretend for a while that it is so you can focus on domestic issues.

Our enemies are re-engaging.

President Obama hoped he could get to 2017 before things fall apart. But at least he got to 2013 before everything started to go belly up for us.