WPR's The New Rules: Obama's Strategic Patience

A lot of national security experts would like a lot more fire -- and firepower -- from our president. Op-ed columnists across America worry that our friends no longer trust us and that our enemies no longer fear us. President Barack Obama's quest for more-equitable burden-sharing among great powers seems to be getting us nowhere, so why bother with more-equitable benefit-sharing?

Read the column in full at World Politics Review.

Comments

[Andrew in DC]

Interesting article - but I think I'd feel more confident that you were onto something if Obama or anyone in his administration could verbalize it the way you do, with a sense of what the future will (and indeed *must*) look like. But I fear you're painting what you see as the outcome on what is really an abdication of strategy with a few sound-bites mixed in.

[Jason from IL]

Good article with many points that I believe. I believe, which you may or may not, that at the end of the day Obama is the smartest guy in the room and is two steps ahead of everyone. He may not be the President may of us hoped he would be but I believe he is the best option we have at this time.
One of my big problems with your argument from this and other articles is that Obama is a transitional president holding the spot for the transformational president. The problem is that in our political system, who is going to make Obama a 1 term president and then carry on his grand foreign policy strategy? On the right, a Romney, Polentey or ,God help us all, a Palin presidency would be a complete 180 and go back to the foreign policy from GW Bush's first term. Any Democratic opponent would try to out flank him on the left to a degree I do not believe your more hawkish side would be comfortable with. The only other option would be a third party in the mold of a Mayor Bloomberg who might follow Obama's liberal pragmatic foreign policy. But then again do we really know where Bloomberg stands on foreign policy?
I guess my point is that I agree with what you're saying but at the end of the day I worry that you're painting him with a narrative of being a one term president that is good enough for now but we can get someone better. I think that's a bad narrative because as of right now I don't see anyone better and we risk losing this strategy you seem to endorse with someone else.