President Barack Obama sought to reassure donors Friday that the foreign policy quandaries facing America today are no more challenging than threats the country has faced before.
Speaking at a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in Purchase, N.Y., the President acknowledged that recent developments in the Middle East and Ukraine are making people feel “anxious,” adding that “if you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart.”
“And the truth of the matter is, is that the world has always been messy,” he said, according to a transcript of his remarks. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.”
Obama’s remarks came a day after he told reporters that his administration did not yet have a strategy for combating Islamic militants in Syria.
Despite the “pretty frightening” barbarities carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Russia’s renewed incursions into Ukraine, Obama told donors that Americans are much less vulnerable to foreign threats than they were just 10 years ago.
“This is not something that is comparable to the challenges we faced during the Cold War,” he said.
He’s right. But there are big changes afoot in the Middle East.
Remember that what proved to be the big catalyst for the Arab Spring was the release of WikiLeaks documents that revealed the absolute corruption of the leadership of most of the N. African Arab countries. The rest of the strife seems to be a vicious conflict between Sunni and Shia (North Africa and Pakistan are mainly Sufi, a very different stripe from Sunni/Shia–more spiritual, less fanatic, apparently) with the Saudis mainly backing the Sunnis and Iran backing Shia (including Assad who is Alawite–a branch of Shiism).
The Saudis were the main promoters, funders and backers of jihad, they founded madrases that taught jihad, and they did so mainly to distract their people from the fact that the royals kept all the money and left the ordinary people very little. Now they fear that the jihadis will turn against them. They wanted to export revolution, not have it in their backyard.
But they now realize they can’t control the extremists.
So what is the US supposed to do in the midst of this set of conflicts?
I’ll tell you what we shouldn’t be doing: Exporting democracy! Democracy should be organic, not transplanted (and, in many ways, enforced). Not everybody wants to live like we do. And exporting democracy creates idiots like al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai.
Should we defend our country? Absolutely – but not with pre-emptive war.
Should we help our allies? Absolutely – but not when they go off the rails like Israel did with Gaza, and not when they dig their own holes like al-Maliki did. (I’m all for the air strikes against ISIL, but nothing further, and definitely no boots on the ground!)
Should we promote democracy? Absolutely – but if the people aren’t buying our brand, shoving it down their throats ain’t gonna make 'em like it.
Obama told donors that Americans are much less vulnerable to foreign threats than they were just 10 years ago.
Ironically social media has shown us Americans are very very vulnerable to law breaking US PIGS.
“President Barack Obama sought to reassure donors Friday that the foreign
policy quandaries facing America today are no more challenging than
threats the country has faced before.”
To my mind no single threat is more than we have faced before but taken together: ebola, poverty, racism here and abroad, Israel-arab conflict, ISIS, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia, Drugs, Illiteracy, underfunding of education, and a do-nothing dysfunctional House of representatives…that’s a pretty impressive list. I’d say that we are indeed faced with more now than at other times in our history. And going into his Presidency Obama was faced with an economy that was tanking in the worst way since the Great Depression (thanks to whom?? One guess and it isn’t Obama). Is it any wonder Obama is going grey??
Depends on the issue. The opposite is actually true for most things. It cleaned up the political mess known as marriage equality in short order as threats and insults become known by friends, family, co-workers and teammates, pretty much immediately. And they have said N-O.
There is no general harm in that.