Obama is Learning the Limits of American Foreign Policy. When Will Republicans?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Jonah Goldberg is critical of President Obama’s opportunistic cast of mind when he deals with foreign policy:

The most plausible interpretation of Obama’s zigzagging approach to foreign policy is that he is simply “winging it,” as Robert W. Merry, editor of the National Interest, writes.

It is difficult to find much, if any, intellectual coherence to the president’s foreign policy. He fought for a surge of troops in Afghanistan but then refused to rally public support for the war he escalated. Worse, he later rendered the surge moot by announcing to our enemies that we’d soon bug out, no matter what.

During Iran’s Green Revolution, he stood pat as the mullahs crushed a democracy movement seeking to overthrow a regime hostile to U.S. interests. In Libya, he intervened to oust a dictator who had become a de facto ally, insisting he couldn’t stand by as innocents were slaughtered. In Syria, a vassal of Iran, he has stood by as innocents were slaughtered.

Goldberg’s tone aside, this is roughly right. The only problem is that he says it as if this is a bad thing. I say: Thank God for winging it. A consistent, ideological approach to foreign policy gave us Afghanistan and Iraq, wars we ended up fighting without any real hope of ever being able to win them. Obama, by contrast, intervened in Libya because there was a realistic chance of achieving his goals, and stayed out of Iran and Syria because there quite plainly wasn’t. Likewise, although Obama’s approach to Egypt has unquestionably been driven by the moment, that’s mostly a reflection of reality: we simply don’t have much leverage there.

This isn’t to say that Obama couldn’t have done better: I think a more consistent support for democratic norms probably would have served us well there. Still, the difference would have been small. $1.5 billion buys us a bit of leverage, but not really that much when there’s revolution in the air. If Goldberg knows of something we could have done to force out Mubarak faster, or prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from winning Egypt’s parliamentary elections, or stop the military from deposing Morsi, I’m all ears.

Besides, I wonder what Goldberg wants? For my money, I’d say Obama’s biggest failures have come precisely when he chose to intervene. If there’s a consistent foreign policy that would have been a relative winner, it probably would have been a foreign policy that simply withdrew from Afghanistan and never intervened in Libya in the first place. Obama’s way might be messy, but the muscle-flexing interventionist approach favored by talk-radio fueled conservatives is flat-out disastrous. So what’s the alternative?

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate