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Huh?
I’m late in coming to it — although Paul Rahe has yet to persuade me to give up the New York Times entirely, I’ve quit reading it first thing every morning — but here’s the very first paragraph of a column, entitled “Obama in Winter,” that David Brooks published on Monday:
They say failure can be a good teacher, but, so far, the Obama administration is opting out of the course. The post-midterm period has been one of the most bizarre of the Obama presidency. President Obama has racked up some impressive foreign-policy accomplishments, but, domestically and politically, things are off the rails.
As you will already have guessed, what caught my eye was the first clause of the third sentence. David apparently considers it so widely understood that the President has “racked up some impressive foreign-policy accomplishments” that he needn’t name them. My own response? What foreign policy accomplishments?
Which brings me to the point at which I throw myself — and David Brooks — upon the tender mercies of the Ricochetti. Am I wrong? If so, please name, oh, let us say three foreign policy accomplishments of this administration. And if I’m right, what about suggesting a few choice words that you’d like to see appear one day in the letters-to-the-editor column?
Image Credit: Mykhaylo Palinchak / Shutterstock.com
Published in Foreign Policy, General
I quit the NY Times back in the hanging chad days of the post 2000 election. That’s when I realized that even their straight news was biased. I despised them before that, but they reached a crescendo and I dropped them. I’ve never looked back. Actually I hate to even open up a NY Times internet article because it gives them a view. I’d love to see them go out of business.
Oops, I’m sorry. My brain wasn’t thinking.
Funny, I thought the same thing when I read that clause. My reaction was contained in 3 letters that the Ricochet COC don’t allow me to utter.
Something about Whiskey and dancing.
In Estonia, where I live, Obama is well liked by the public, although this is a right-of-center country and generally tacks towards Republican leadership in the US (that’s how the small expat Estonian community in the States tends to vote as well), but Obama came here and give the Article 5 pledge in September. I was at the speech.
It’s something that every president has done since the foundation of NATO, but I miscalculated how much it meant to the locals to come here and say it in Tallinn. That was important.
Bush came to Tallinn, but he didn’t give a public address (it was not long after a grenade was thrown at him in Tbilisi, which is what one of the White House advance team told me was the main reason he didn’t appear in an official capacity in public. They were still skittish).
I saw the effects of the presidential halo up close and personal. I even got a little of the “hope and change” vibe from Obama’s speech, although six years has made me sufficiently cynical to identify the strawmen. But it was a good speech, despite the some of the others, such as Troy Senik, parsed a tributary section of it at the time (I was writing for my life, and no time to rebut).
As far as I see it, and maybe I’m off-base and should be corrected by the Ricochetti.
But it seems to me that there is an (perhaps institutional?) inertia to some extent through NATO and other organizations that will help Eastern Eastern through the current crisis regarding Russia. American troops have been based in Estonia for most of the year, including troops from Fort Hood.
Tuesday, the US sold Javelin missiles to Estonia, which will be a game-changer in a Ukrainian-type scenario. So the US is still having a positive foreign policy outcome here where I live. Whether that is administration policy or just normal operation of the foreign policy apparatus – it is real. And M-1 Abrams tanks are parked 60 miles from me as I type.
When the 173rd airborne, which was the first group of Americans to arrive in Estonia after the Crimean takeover, it was like the country took a deep sigh of relief. My Estonian wife sang the Mickey Mouse Club theme song as the troops marched off their transport plane (such is the power of culture).
Up to that point, we were bombarded with “is Estonia next?” type of stories about Russia’s ambitions. Estonia has been a reliable ally to the US; taking part in Afghanistan (the dangerous part, Helmand), and Iraq. They spend their 2 % of GDP under NATO obligations. The US sent a few hundred troops and about a dozen armored vehicles, and everybody sleeps well at night again. That here is a unalloyed foreign policy good, whoever is responsible.
If an accomplishment is defined as when one achieves his original goals, Obama is an accomplished president. His goal was to bring America down a notch or two in the world, and he’s accomplished that goal.
Single handedly weakening the greatest super power on earth is a significant foreign policy accomplishment by any measure.
Who thought that the Cold War could be revived?
No, that was Bush’s doing.
Well, he was chewing gum…
You guys are completely misunderstanding what David is going for here. He’s the funniest Brooks since Foster.
(He was trying to be funny, right?)
I believe that Obama’s foreign policy objectives are:
If these are his actual objectives then he is going about it the correct way
I agree. The President lacks feck. Feck him.
I had a much different reaction to this: why does anyone read op-eds at all?
Like Peter, I also haven’t completely quit the NYT – but I only read their news section.
The op-ed staffs of all the major dailies are composed of rag-tag bunches of decent but not great writers, who have little to do with the rest of the paper and who generally have nothing more interesting to say than hundreds of other opinion writers easily found on the internet.
Op-eds are an anachronism, and the daily newspapers would be advised to can their in-house writers and only pick up syndicated columns, if any.
Scott Abel: “The US sent a few hundred troops and about a dozen armored vehicles, and everybody sleeps well at night again. That here is a unalloyed foreign policy good, whoever is responsible.”
—
This is “saving” ten percent off of a shredded dollar. Putin is only in Ukraine because of Obama’s weakness.
He made Michelle proud of America for the first time. QED
I can name more than three places where things are much worse than they were in 2009: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Russia and Eastern Europe, our southern border…
David Brooks lives on a planet in Galaxy MACS0647-JD, where his eyes and ears have burned up under the heat of the triple sun.
“Huh?” is right.
(borrowing from Andrew Klavan)
Wow, almost 50 comments. That’s a lot of talk to essentially say nothing at all.
Kind of funny really. When Obama talks about his accomplishments he also talks a whole lot and says almost nothing at all.
You think it’s contagious?
Thank you for this, Scott. In the first place, there’s nothing like an eyewitness account, and what you offer here is real reporting. And in the second? You’re right. Although I myself believe Obama should be much more blunt in confronting Putin, the administration hasn’t been bad, not bad at all, in its policy toward the Baltic states.
His being the first openly gay President of the US of A has made life so much easier for homosexuals in Russia as well as throughout most of Middle East in general.
I do what I can, jsdro. I should have been all over Obama’s visit, since I was right there and in the thick of it, but two days after Obama’s visit, Russia kidnapped Eston Kohver, and I never got a chance to talk about it on Ricochet. When the fur flies in this part of the world, I am King Canute at the shoreline with my journalism and teaching jobs. ;)
But Peter pushed the right button this time.
Can you explain this allusion?
Canute was some kind of viking king? Not sure about the shoreline part.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_waves
;)
Hey thanks. I appreciate it.
My google-fu is weak.
I googled for
but neither of them referenced the original allusion.
One of the problems with searching is that if you know the proper keywords it’s easy to find something, but if you don’t then you are up a creek without a paddle.
Plus, those who know the proper keywords think you are an idiot and link you to:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=king+canute+and+the+waves&l=1
There really is no substitute for a dynamic human response to inquiry, with the human ability to consolidate disparate information and connect events, inferences, and opinions in the answer. Even a summary is often illuminating because it contains the speaker’s prioritized version of information.
Anyway, learned something new.