The Cost of Disowning Jimmy Carter
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What Democrats Lose When They Run From Carter's Foreign Policy Legacy
(excerpt)
ALTHOUGH BARACK OBAMA wont admit it, his foreign policy instincts and Jimmy Carters have much in common. Like Carter, Obama took office in the wake of a disastrous war. And like Carter, he has responded by attempting to discard the doctrine that underlay it. For Carter, the war was Vietnam and the doctrine was global containment. For Obama, it is Iraq and the war on terror, a term coined under George W. Bush that Obama pointedly ditched. Like Carter, Obama argued that this doctrine of permanent war burdened Americas economy and justified the violation of civil liberties at home and human rights abroad. Like Carter, he believes it damaged Americas worldwide reputation. And like Carter, he believes it spawned a heavy-handed interventionism that provoked nationalist backlashes overseas.
But perhaps most important, Obama, like Carter, believes he inherited a doctrine shaped by excessive fear. Where Carter told students at Notre Dame that American foreign policy should not be motivated by an inordinate fear of communism, Obama in May 2013 told an audience at the National Defense University that we have to make decisions based not on fear but on hard-earned wisdom. That wisdom, Obama argued, required recognizing that although al-Qaidas spin-offs could still launch attacks, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11. As a result, although America should make persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists, it need no longer fight a boundless war on terror.
As in the late 1970s, the debate between Obama and his hawkish critics is in part a debate between a president who believes that the world is trending Americas wayand thus that the United States should not overreact to problems by doing stupid shitand critics who believe that Americas foes are gaining the upper hand. In a speech in 2011, Mitt Romney blasted the wishful thinking that the world is becoming a safer place. The opposite is true. Obama, by contrast, last August told a fundraiser that things are much less dangerous now than they were 20 years ago, 25 years ago, or 30 years ago.
This debate between calm and fear, or optimism and pessimism, plays itself out across a range of subjects. One of them is Russia. Many Republicans have claimed that Vladimir Putin is, in the words of former Republican House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, running circles around the U.S., and ushering in a frightening new era in which dictators invade their neighbors with impunity. (Which is pretty much what hawks said when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.) Obama, by contrast, has argued that Putin is not strong but weak. Russia looks pretty aggressive right now, he said at the fundraiser last August, but Russias economy is going nowhere. Like Carter, who believed that economic stagnation would curtail Soviet expansionism, Obama has argued that financial marketsprimed by Western sanctionsare punishing Putin for his actions in Ukraine. And that far from ushering in a new era of Russian strength, Putins behavior simply exposes his countrys underlying weakness.
A parallel debate has occurred on the subject of Arab democracy. After their Bush-era flirtation with optimism about democracys prospects in the Mideast, most Obama-era hawks have returned to 1970s-style pessimism. Echoing Kirkpatricks defense of Nicaraguas Somoza and the Shah of Iran, many conservative politicians and pundits have praised Egypts military ruler, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as preferable to his democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood predecessor, Mohamed Morsi. Last June on Charlie Rose, for instance, Dick Cheney said hed help Sisi every chance I get.
Obama, by contrast, like Carter, has been more supportive than his critics of popular protests against American-backed dictators. (Which is far from saying that he has ditched every tyrannical U.S. ally. His willingness to prioritize democracy is, like Carters, relative.) In 2011, with Egyptians massed in Tahrir Square, Obama overruled Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates and called for Hosni Mubarak to leave office immediately. Which led Rush Limbaugh, after a lengthy monologue about Carter and Reagan, to quip, Obama seems determined to give us Iran on the Nile.
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http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/2015/01/30/Cost-Disowning-Jimmy-Carter?mref=scroll
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It was shameful. And the MSM was more than willing to play along, thanks to GOP buying it up.
Well, it's time for some monopolies to be broken up, some wrongs to be righted, and the Civil War to finally be put to rest.