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Is Barack Obama a Grand Strategist of the Very First Rank?
In The American Conservative, Alfred W. McCoy — Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, and co-editor of Endless Empire: Europe’s Eclipse, Spain’s Retreat, America’s Decline — argues that this is so, and this is how he begins:
In ways that have eluded Washington pundits and policymakers, President Barack Obama is deploying a subtle geopolitical strategy that, if successful, might give Washington a fighting chance to extend its global hegemony deep into the 21st century. After six years of silent, sometimes secret preparations, the Obama White House has recently unveiled some bold diplomatic initiatives whose sum is nothing less than a tri-continental strategy to check Beijing’s rise. As these moves unfold, Obama is revealing himself as one of those rare grandmasters who appear every generation or two with an ability to go beyond mere foreign policy and play that ruthless global game called geopolitics.
Since he took office in 2009, Obama has faced an unremitting chorus of criticism, left and right, domestic and foreign, dismissing him as hapless, even hopeless. “He’s a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to understand reality,” said Venezuela’s leftist president Hugo Chavez, just months after Obama’s inauguration. “I think he has projected a position of weakness and… a lack of leadership,” claimed Republican Sen. John McCain in 2012. “After six years,” opined a commentator from the conservative Heritage Foundation last April, “he still displays a troubling misunderstanding of power and the leadership role the United States plays in the international system.” Even former Democratic President Jimmy Carter recently dismissed Obama’s foreign policy achievements as “minimal.” Voicing the views of many Americans, Donald Trump derided his global vision this way: “We have a president who doesn’t have a clue.”
But let’s give credit where it’s due. Without proclaiming a presumptuously labeled policy such as “triangulation,” “the Nixon Doctrine,” or even a “freedom agenda,” Obama has moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered deftly to rebuild America’s fading global influence.
I am inclined to think that McCoy must have been smoking some dope laced with acid, but you may think otherwise. You should read his argument and respond.
Published in Foreign Policy
The sentiment has been around for a while. Si vis pacem, para bellum. West Point would be one of the places that can be counted on not to forget that, and to impress it on their graduates.
Absolutely.
Actually, it does. 2008-2016 is a decrease in spending.
But we sequestered, right? Everything got cut. Hardly an invidious action, in fact I would hail this as highly responsible given our fiscal difficulties.
Try looking here:
But what are we supposed to make of these? Military spending as percentage of GDP is much higher under BO than was true before 9/11, over 1 whole percentage point at least on average. I’m not seeing your objection. Also, we have a national debt problem of monumental proportions and no one wants to touch Social Security or Medicare spending. I am afraid that forces the military to take a bigger hit. That’s what Americans seem to prefer.
What they prefer is a question worthy of debate. What they should prefer is, however, clear — a military strong enough to do what needs doing . . . and that we no longer have. Cut pensions out of the military budget and see what is left. Then, consider its mission.
Prove it. You don’t spend that kind of money and get chopped liver.
All spending is relative to the mission. Right now, our technical advantages are being minimized by spying, we are spending billions on the F-35 Clay Pigeon, and we may end up fighting the Chinese, the Russians, and the Jihadists simultaneously, without allies. No one knows how many nuclear weapons the Chinese have, or if ours still function.
We are not going to fight the Russians. If we have doubts about whether our nukes function, imagine how much more the Chinese worry given how much more testing we have done.
Count the ships, count the brigades, count the planes, and consider the fact that we are still flying the B-52, a plane first introduced when I was a child. Our arsenal has shrunk in the last eight years dramatically, but the scope of our mission has not declined. And when you consider our military budget, you should subtract what we spend on pensions and on medical care for those retired.
If you are fretting about the national debt — which is a legitimate worry — you should ask yourself what it would look like if we find ourselves in a war for which we are under-prepared. There is hardly anything the federal government does that is as important as defense.
In this connection, you might want to think about Stanley Baldwin — who, in the 1930s when Britain was caught up in the depression, took a tack similar to the one for which you are arguing.
Which doesn’t even get to the fact that national defense is the federal government’s damn job! Unlike, you know, retirement funding and health insurance.
So the voters don’t get to determine what the government should be spending their money on? They see the following chart and decide that we have margin.
Which combination of those countries would you rather have outspend us?
You normally acquit yourself better than this. We fly the B-52 because continuing to use it for missions it remains admirably suited for saves us money. Using this datum as centerpiece evidence for a dwindling military capability just shows that you don’t have the expertise to make these claims.
Come on people, this is ridiculous. We outspend China and Russia put together 2-1, and you think heading into our fiscal nightmare in the decades ahead we have the luxury of spending more? Seriously? I mean seriously? I got news for you, we will be spending less almost assuredly.
We have no existential threats, not even close. Incidentally, when you factor in the impact of fracking and demographics (ours being vastly superior to any other developed country in the world), our future is going to be so much brighter than anyone elses it won’t be funny. Consult Peter Zeihan for the straight skinny on this.
PS. Did you notice that three of the other countries on that list are titular allies of ours.
I know you think you’re being eminently reasonable, Manfred. But, as I see it, people with your viewpoint look around at the state of the world and the country’s debt situation and want to (further) reduce the military — about the only activity for which the federal government is properly suited and commissioned by the people. It’s just nuts to me.
I and others with my viewpoint extend the maxim, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” to our national defense and we want our military — arguably the greatest force for good in the last century and this one — to have the biggest, baddest guns on the planet.
We outstrip the Chinese and the Russians by a mile? Good! Let’s keep it that way. There are at least a dozen agencies the federal government has no business dabbling in, including the — by far — biggest money suck, HHS. Cut there first and forever.
Well you will get part of your wish. We will have to cut everything.
You are wrong about the B-52. We continue to use it because we have not yet built something to replace it. It is a dinosaur. I know considerably more than you do about these matters.
Aristotle himself could not have come up with a better example of a tautology. And for a dinosaur, it still seems to be terribly useful: