Now that the U.S. is in effect the facilitator of the bad guys, what will happen to the relatively good guys?

Barry Rubin contemplates how the certainty of bad or weak U.S. international leadership during at least the next four years will affect countries around the world.

- end of initial entry -

January 11

Daniel F. writes:

Here is another article by Barry Rubin that is also very good. The points he makes are really obvious, but it is impossible to get most people to think about these issues in a logical way. Obama supporters, libertarians, and paleocons absolutely refuse to think independently or critically about the administration’s foreign policy (unless they are complaining that Obama is “too” pro-Israel) and keep beating the dead horse of the Iraq war, as if there were any possibility of our undertaking a similar invasion of some other country anytime soon. (No one is proposing to invade Iran and, in any event, there seems to be zero likelihood of our taking military action of any kind against it.)

Meanwhile, the Republican/conservative establishment continues to try to justify the Iraq war, to argue that Obama is not doing enough to “save” Afghanistan, and to talk about foreign policy in the same apocalyptic tone that one found in Commentary circa 1979. (The apocalypse may well be coming, but it’s not coming from our overseas enemies—we’re visiting it upon ourselves, in a dozen different ways.) All very discouraging.

What both the Obamanite / libertartian / paleocon faction and the Republican / neocon faction are missing is a coherent view of the specifically American national interest. You could say that they are both working to advance and empower America’s enemies in the Islamic world. The difference between the two groups is that the former group does not admit that the enemies of America in the Islamic world that the administration is working to empower are America’s enemies, while the latter group does not admit that the policies it advocates will empower those enemies.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 09, 2013 08:25 PM | Send