This article in Mosaic interesting because it draws same conclusion I drew a long time ago - Obama's true foreign policy intentions are hidden behind obfuscation and outright lies because they are alarmingly dangerous and disruptive of the status quo in their beliefs and sympathies - this clearly on display with Iran negotiations - the writer posits hypothesis that I've been touting as the truth of what's actually going on here for quite awhile now - namely, the writer asks, if Obama had never intended to stop Iran and had long ago settled on a policy of containment wouldn't he be shrouding that truth by doing exactly what he's doing now? In short, talk tough but secretly push everything towards negotiations that have no hope of being successful but do accomplish two things: keep Israel in check and endlessly delay a need for US action behind 'giving peace a chance' gibberish.
Don't know why it has taken so long for commentators to figure this out about Obama - maybe because I'm such a wretched cynic I'm used to always thinking the worst of people, which is why very early on I came to the conclusion that Obama was a highly skilled liar who with shameless cunning used his favoured status with the press and media to hide his extremism behind a facade of reasonableness - his whole approach to politics I believe is based on this dynamic and it worked so long as he was was nothing more than a community organizer or state legislator or senator, where he could get away with covering himself in pretty, high sounding rhetoric and never be held responsible for producing something real that actually works - when you're president, you've got to produce and he hasn't and therefore the lying and misdirection used to push an agenda forward becomes harder and harder to pull off regardless of your media allies willingness to help you out - this most infamously on display with Obamacare, where he told bald faced lies to push it through but no amount of gauze thrown over the monstrosity by biased midwives eager to serve the great cause like the NY Times editorial page can hide the fact from the curious that it's a very ugly baby indeed.
But as bad as Obamacare and the economy in general are, all domestic issues for that matter - this behaviour has produced a foreign policy that is just as bad, just as misguided, and the consequences of that may prove much worse in the long run. Even the Mosaic writer I think, although he sees the disturbing common strains binding the Obama foreign policy together, fails to ascribe this pattern to an overall deliberate agenda designed to shrink the American strategic profile in a significant way and bring it in keeping with the far left's view of the US Military and what America's place in the world should be - i.e. that the military is a fundamentally evil tool serving the interests of the racist anglo saxon capitalist elite that siphons off much needed funds that could be better used in fostering the academy's dream of a new American brand of progressive socialism that will have a much more cooperative relationship with the wide world because, hell, who would object to a socialist version of America? This is the default position of the academic left that nurtured Obama's world view - and as far as I'm concerned everything Obama has done foreign policy wise, once you dig beneath the lies and obscuring rhetoric and misdirection, can be seen as being roughly in keeping with it. If successful, this agenda would dramatically distort and undermine the strategic geometry tentatively holding the world together and throw the West into a precarious position that may be quite difficult to crawl back from - what really scares me is that the bad players in the world - Iran, Muslim extremists in general, China and Putin - are all looking at the White House and no doubt seeing what I'm seeing and are consequently asking themselves: we've got three more years of this guy - how far do we go in exploiting the opportunity?
Don't know why it has taken so long for commentators to figure this out about Obama - maybe because I'm such a wretched cynic I'm used to always thinking the worst of people, which is why very early on I came to the conclusion that Obama was a highly skilled liar who with shameless cunning used his favoured status with the press and media to hide his extremism behind a facade of reasonableness - his whole approach to politics I believe is based on this dynamic and it worked so long as he was was nothing more than a community organizer or state legislator or senator, where he could get away with covering himself in pretty, high sounding rhetoric and never be held responsible for producing something real that actually works - when you're president, you've got to produce and he hasn't and therefore the lying and misdirection used to push an agenda forward becomes harder and harder to pull off regardless of your media allies willingness to help you out - this most infamously on display with Obamacare, where he told bald faced lies to push it through but no amount of gauze thrown over the monstrosity by biased midwives eager to serve the great cause like the NY Times editorial page can hide the fact from the curious that it's a very ugly baby indeed.
But as bad as Obamacare and the economy in general are, all domestic issues for that matter - this behaviour has produced a foreign policy that is just as bad, just as misguided, and the consequences of that may prove much worse in the long run. Even the Mosaic writer I think, although he sees the disturbing common strains binding the Obama foreign policy together, fails to ascribe this pattern to an overall deliberate agenda designed to shrink the American strategic profile in a significant way and bring it in keeping with the far left's view of the US Military and what America's place in the world should be - i.e. that the military is a fundamentally evil tool serving the interests of the racist anglo saxon capitalist elite that siphons off much needed funds that could be better used in fostering the academy's dream of a new American brand of progressive socialism that will have a much more cooperative relationship with the wide world because, hell, who would object to a socialist version of America? This is the default position of the academic left that nurtured Obama's world view - and as far as I'm concerned everything Obama has done foreign policy wise, once you dig beneath the lies and obscuring rhetoric and misdirection, can be seen as being roughly in keeping with it. If successful, this agenda would dramatically distort and undermine the strategic geometry tentatively holding the world together and throw the West into a precarious position that may be quite difficult to crawl back from - what really scares me is that the bad players in the world - Iran, Muslim extremists in general, China and Putin - are all looking at the White House and no doubt seeing what I'm seeing and are consequently asking themselves: we've got three more years of this guy - how far do we go in exploiting the opportunity?
