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I had expected that there would be little in last week’s State of the Union address about foreign policy as it is not an Administration strength, but, to my surprise, President Barack Obama gave it about eight minutes, a little over 1000 words. Governor Nikki Haley was, however, more detached from the issue in her rebuttal speech, stating only that “… we are facing the most dangerous terrorist threat our nation has seen since September 11th, and this president appears either unwilling or unable to deal with it.”
Obama made a number of points which illustrate his own inclinations regarding how to deal with the rest of the world. He emphasized that America, the “most powerful nation on earth,” must be the global leader, “…when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead. They call us.”
Regarding the major conflict zones, he observed that “In today’s world, we’re threatened less by evil empires and more by failing states. The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia. Russia is pouring resources in to prop up Ukraine and Syria, client states that they saw slipping away from their orbit.”
Obama added that “Both Al Qaida and now ISIL pose a direct threat to our people… Our foreign policy has to be focused on the threat from ISIL and Al Qaida. We have to take them out. For more than a year, America has led a coalition of more than 60 countries…If this Congress is serious about winning this war and wants to send a message to our troops and the world, authorize the use of military force against ISIL.”
Concerning nation building, Obama opined that “We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis…even if it’s done with the best of intentions. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately will weaken us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam. It’s the lesson of Iraq, and we should have learned it by now.”
And how to lead effectively? “On issues of global concern, we will mobilize the world to work with us, and make sure other countries pull their own weight. That’s our approach to conflicts like Syria, where we’re partnering with local forces and leading international efforts to help that broken society pursue a lasting peace.”
A final State of the Union Address is more than most a political document, intended to establish a loose framework of success that will enable the president’s party to prevail in the next presidential election. This is why Obama, instead of addressing substantive issues in a serious way, gave time to the warm and fuzzy perspectives that will define the Democratic Party in national elections later this year. He touched on gay marriage, education reform, job growth, Obamacare, and on guns legislation, all of which are core issues for those who align with the Democrats. The reality of each of those alleged “successes” can, of course, be challenged as failures or even unconstitutional, but the highly structured and almost ritualistic annual presidential speech does not exactly present much of a debating society opportunity for the opposition party.
I have long thought that President Obama is basically a moderate politically speaking who is extremely cautious and disinclined to take any risks. He was, admittedly, elected president in spite of his having had no experience that qualified him for the office. His electoral success was due to a number of factors coming together, most notably a scary GOP candidate coupled with growing antiwar sentiment that was a reaction to the Bush regime’s muscular nationalism. Understanding that, Obama made some gestures that miscategorized him as a “peace” candidate and eventually earned him a Nobel Prize but he quickly surrendered his independence to the consensus driven advisers who were products of the groupthink that drives foreign policy in Washington. In short, he has received some very bad advice and the State of the Union Address inadvertently identifies just what is wrong with the way the Administration views itself within the context of the international community.
It is particularly odd to note the Obama contention that the United States must be the leader, which he cites several times. To a certain extent the claim is little more than self-satisfied preening, but it also goes along with the oft-stated contention that the U.S. President is “leader of the free world,” an expression that Obama frequently uses. Unfortunately, there is no such mandate and it is likely that if an election were held many so-called allies would be reluctant to concede leadership to Washington. The claim that other nations clamor for American leadership is hokum. Germans, in fact, believe that the United States role in world affairs is essentially negative.
And the assertion that Washington is leading a coalition of 60 countries to fight ISIS is clueless, as the coalition is basically inert and toothless, having only acquired some momentum after the Russians intervened on behalf of Syria. Leading coalition partners, to include Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have all along been playing a double game, supporting ISIS more often than not while many other nominal allies have done little or nothing. And the moderate rebels that White House expects to one day raise the liberty cap over Damascus? They have disappeared.
Indeed, Obama’s view of the conflict zones appears to derive more from a cold war style Manichean mentality than from current realities. Russia is incorrectly seen as having “client states” while the ongoing violence in the Middle East is regarded as a process of going through “transformations” that are “rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.” That is a comment that could have been coined by George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice but it is self-serving misreading of reality intended to shift the blame for the anarchy in the region.
Ancient history does not explain the contemporary Middle East. Including the festering Israel and Palestine conflict, which has taken on its current form due to the connivance of Washington as Israel’s patron, all of the unrest in the region is quite plausibly a direct or indirect result of American missteps, starting with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 coupled with the attempts to destabilize and change regime in Syria that started in the same year, followed by the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011.
And Obama in his speech appears to want to up the ante, asking congress for war powers to get more deeply into the Syrian civil war. It contradicts his call for learning from past mistakes in Vietnam and Iraq and makes clear that the White House has not benefitted from hindsight as it intends to again repeat using military intervention as a foreign policy tool. It is also telling that Obama did not mention learning anything from the disastrous intervention in Libya, which, of course, occurred on his watch and that of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The fact is that the Arab world was relatively stable even if it was not very free before the U.S. sought fit to intervene in serial fashion after 9/11 and it would be nice if the president would just give that a nod, particularly as he went on to say that the United States should not seek to “take over and rebuild” every country that falls into “crisis.” As Obama has not hesitated to continue to do exactly that in Afghanistan with intentions to do likewise in Syria one has to question his perception of where the problem lies.
And finally, there is the question of what to do about terrorism. Describing ISIS and al Qaeda as major threats and the “focus” of U.S. foreign policy gives the groups way too much credit and also enhances their appeal to young Muslim men who will no doubt be volunteering in droves as a response to the Obama message. The reality is that they are not a major threat and never have been and if U.S. foreign policy is focused on them it is a bad misreading of what is important and what is not. Maintaining good working relations with adversaries Russia and China is far more important, as is increasing multilateral cooperation with friendly Asian rim nations and allies in Europe. Diplomacy is not just engaged in repressing bad guys, it is more so about building positive relations with friends and potential allies as well as bridges to opponents.
Foreign policy does not win or lose national elections but the diminished status of diplomacy over the past twenty years coupled with a basic incomprehension of what to do about the development of a multipolar world should be troubling for many Americans because the United States no longer operates in a vacuum. The perpetuation of myths that the U.S. must lead and should take steps to correct the policies of other nations, to include engineering regime change, must be once and for all explicitly discarded. Obama could have called for something like that but he didn’t.
The United States of America does just fine when it minds its own business and seeks friendship with everyone, as President George Washington recommended in his Farewell Address. Even the so-called terrorist problem would be much diminished because, as Ron Paul has correctly observed, “they are over here because we are over there.” Unfortunately, an undoubtedly intelligent and seemingly well-intentioned man like Barack Obama has chosen to go with the Washington consensus rather than heed his own instincts, which is something of a tragedy as whoever succeeds him in office later this year is not likely to possess either of those virtues and will no doubt double down on “America the exceptional.”
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Why are we over there? Simple. Because Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Or Eurasia. Or something like that. And Big Brother comes on our screens for the Two Minutes’ Hate to tell us how bad Emanuel Goldstein, or ISIL, or ISIS — or whatever — is.
Got it, Julia? Good. Carry on.
Sad that a man who appreciated T.S. Eliot in his youth could turn into the apotheosis of a dissembler once placed into power.
Nikki Haley honor killing soon.
“The United States of America does just fine when it minds its own business and seeks friendship with everyone…”
And that happened when? Right from its very inception – and, indeed, even before – the USA was a self-seeking ruffian looking for wealth (other people’s) and trouble.
Mr Giraldi unconsciously contradicts himself within a few words. The USA does mind its own business; the trouble is that it believes its business to be exploiting all the resources of the entire world to its own advantage and the disadvantage of others. That does not engender “friendship with everyone”.
You may, as most successful Americans seem to, believe that one should “never give a sucker an even break” and that “there is one [sucker] born every minute”. But it’s impossible to seek friendship with people you are dedicated to treating as suckers – cheating them, lying to them, robbing them, and killing them if they complain or resist.
Mr. Giraldi remains one of this site’s most valuable contributors. But his soft spot for Barack Obama comes through yet again.
For the author, even seven years in, our poor, inexperienced President has taken bad advice, but he at least saved us from John McCain, who would have killed even more people had he been entrusted to deal with “opponents” Russia and China. Really? That narrow, red/blue thought spectrum will continue to tint national politics in any event, but it’s baffling and disappointing to see it here.
Mr. Giraldi might benefit from a night out with Linh Dinh.
I’ve had an allergy to listening to American politicians giving speeches for many years. They don’t write the speeches, they’re written by professional speechwriters and are merely read off the teleprompter. It’s just watching an actor reading off his lines, that’s all. I’ve already had the Gettysburg Address read out loud to us in grammar school, a speech that lasts just a few minutes but gets to the point. These politicians just bloviate endlessly. It’s all bluster, lies, half-truths and deception anyway; what’s in any of it that’s really true? As usual, bogeyman have to be held up to frighten the American public to justify more money being poured down the national security state rathole, an income transfer scheme that’s welfare for the rich. They can’t make a speech without saber rattling and issuing threats.
Why are we “over there”? Because it’s a bandit state roaming the world on land and by sea looking for weakness and easy pickings, that’s why.
the u.s. (and pre u.s.) has always been a nightmare
now
it is in service to histories greatest nightmare, histories greatest haters, histories most insane –
the diseased mind with lies for brain cells
Mr. Giraldi, Obama was right when he said that the only way to fight “evildoers” (al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Shabaab, al-Nusra, Boko Haram, etc. is to work with United States. Because, all these and many other state terrorism are “mothered” by the United States itself to fulfill its imperial agenda and destroy any future threat to the Zionist entity.
However, Obama was fooling himself and others to claim that United States is the most powerful nation in the world. In fact since WWII, America has only attacked only countries which either had very limited military power or none at all, such as, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somali, Panama, Libya, etc.
“In today’s world, we’re threatened less by evil empires and more by failing states. The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia. Russia is pouring resources in to prop up Ukraine and Syria, client states that they saw slipping away from their orbit,” said Obama, which confirmed my belief that he like Ronald Reagan could make money at Hollywood.
America is threatened less evil empires – because “America is world’s biggest terrorist state,” Dr. Noam Chomsky.
Middle East’s problems don’t go back millennia – “It became after the creation of state of Israel in Palestine,” Dr. Richard Falk, ex-UNHRC envy for occupied Palestine.
Russia has only one Arab client (Syria) left, while the US has numerous clients (Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, Bahrain, etc.) in the region.
Ukraine had long been part of Soviet Russia, and is now controlled by pro-West Jewish oligarchs.
In February 2015, Alexander Zakharchenko, prime minister of the separatist Donesk People Republic has called the US-EU installed regime in Kiev as controlled by miserable Jews.
http://rehmat1.com/2015/02/05/donetsk-pm-ukraine-run-by-miserable-jews/
This is the lie of “Our Noble Intentions”. The Republicans and Democrats=Roy Demeo Mafia racket. Our Troops…the ones we are to suppose to support….effectively act as Jack Kucklinski violent psychopathic hitman-serial killers for the Republican-Democratic Party Mafia Dons.
1) F “Support the Troops…thank you for protecting us” nonsense that every fat jock-sniffing-girly boy White Male sportsfan utters….If it is WW2 type urgency that we have to be in Afghanistan-Iraq-Syria-Iran…then have a God Dam Draft…of young women also.
2) It is bold face lying to state that we have to be over there….Irag-Afghanistan-Syria-Iran…or they will come here and kill us. All that has to be done is implement a National Origins Immigration Policy that excludes all Muslims…and deport the rest of the Muslim “Americans” out of the US.
3)Muslim legal immigrants are being imported into the US for one reason and one reason only:TO VOTE FUCKING WHITEY INTO A VIOLENTY PERSECUTED RACIAL MINORTY ON NOV 3 2016.
4)No Muslims on Native Born White American Living and Breeding Space=9/11 never happens. 9/11 Truthers are psychopathic vile-repellant liars.
5)To state the very obvious:No Muslim “Americans” on Native Born White American Living and Breeding Space=no Muslim “American” Yoot terrorists attacks on Native Born White Christian American Living and Breeding Space. It is this GD simple.
ROFL. Now, cut that out!!
The whole Cold War…which continues into 2016…needs to be re-thought. If the Truth be Told-which I am about to tell….Post-WW2 Russia was never the real threat to The Historic Native Born White American Majority. The real and very obvious existential threat to The Historic Native Born White American Majority were the MEGA CEOs and Jewish Zionists interests who own both the Democratic Party and Republican Party.
Barack Obama would never have been elected POTUS in 2008 and 2012 if The Historic Native Born White America Majority had rejected the Cold War Against The Soviet-Union-Russia. We could have avoided monstrosities such as the Lisping Kenyan Foreigner being elected POTUS twice by a majority non-white high fertility-highly racialized imported Democratic Party Voting Bloc.
Barack Obama’s Kenyan Father was allowed into the US through a Cold War Era Foreign Student Program. In other words, a one night stand of a 17 year old White Female teenager with an older Kenyan Foriegner + the War Against Russia gave us a lisping narcissistic homosexual Kenyan Foreigner War Criminal POTUS in 2008 and 2012…No one saw this coming….but you should have.
What I have written above is the context in which the very rapid-race replacement of The Historic Native Born White American Majority must be understood:it is a direct consequence of the Cold War against Russia.
You are gonna hate every second,minute,hour,day,week,month,year…of being a violently persecuted racial minority in post-white toilet bowl “America”..Enjoy your constitutional right to own a gun, and an assault weapon…for they will offer you 0 protection in post-white toilet bowl America even if one China-Bride wife living in Colorado supports your right to own hunting rifles and assault rifles on her website.
Could I humbly suggest you replace “Muslims” with “Jews”?
http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/09/the-connection-between-zionism-and-organized-islamophobia-the-facts/
Shalom and thanks.
Rehmat
The current trajectory of the US is not sustainable for human life-whatever the racial clan. Whoever thinks that they are going to inherit the US is in for a rude awakening. The forces of ecological-species destruction and ecological collapse have been set into motion within the borders of the US.
Yes, I do think the hyper-ethnic Jewish State of Israel will try and grab a piece of the action-which they already seem to be doing in California via California’s technological-educational infrastructure(source:Counterpunch).
If you want to claim that Jews are playing a significant role in the destruction of the US…well, I won’t argue against you. But Jews can only get away with it because of Israel’s fanatical supporters down in Evangelical Christian Zionist Country. This is where I put the rock-bottom blame.
Well you Jews have your reasons to destroy Muslim world with the help of 65 million Christian Zionist – and they have their biblical reasons to support the illegal Jewish occupation of Palestine.
Netanyahu admitted why those Christian Zionists support Israel, by saying: “As long as those bastards are on our side.”
Mark Ames, a Moscow-based Jewish American journalist and editor, explained a good reason why Christian Zionists support Israel.
“The 65 million American Evangelical cultists love Jews for one simple reason: They hope to bundle every hairy Jewish ass up, air-freight them to the West Bank and East Jerusalem (once those areas have been cleansed of Muslims), and use the Jews as bait to bring upon the Rapture, as kindling in the Apocalypse, the final battle that will bring Jesus back to Earth. None of this can happen until every last Jew is penned into the occupied territories and the Jews won’t get there unless the far-right runs Israel and America. Currently 65 million American cultists are using everything in their power, from prayer to politics, to make this Helter Skelter scenario come true,” Ames said.
Would you agree with your US-Russian brother, Moshe?
http://rehmat1.com/2010/11/27/save-a-jew-save-yourself/
If one considers Obama’s ‘strategic blunders’ (attitude, actually) have actually promoted regional war (Syria/Iraq) and upped tensions across multiple regions, Middle East, Eastern Europe, and East Asia, other than lip service condemning torture even as it has gone on at Guantanamo, Obama is on target to be among the greatest of White Evangelicals. Demand your food be halal? On Commander-in-Chief Obama’s watch, at Guantanamo, the USA will shove it *literally* up your ass.
Obama’s actions compare well to the Evangelical epistemology. Does anyone else recall the über-right of the American politic having challenged Obama to ‘come out’ and declare in support of American exceptionalism? He did it. Little different to Hillary’s spiritual guru is Doug Coe in common with the most right-wing of America’s ubermensch, Obama’s neo-liberalism (if it actually is that) as relates to foreign policy is remarkably similar to the worst of the American religious right that purports to despise him. Meanwhile, Obama certainly seems to be true to his ‘White’ Christian roots.
What is actually amazing in this scenario is, how White Evangelicals despise Obama, despite his bending over backwards to please on those foreign policy issues so dear to their hearts, for instance bombing the f**k out of Muslims all the while feeding civil wars to generate Muslims killing each other in droves. But then again, myopia is a societal disease in the USA which actually also seems to believe they have a Black president; when recalling Obama was ditched by his single White mother to be raised by his White grandparents. By the same logic a man being half Black makes him Black, given his upbringing, Obama is pure vanilla.
Btw, good article Phil.
Bernie Sanders will win the nomination and the general election.
‘the world needs American leadership…America must lead..the world looks to Washington and not Moscow or Beijing..”
Why this curious obsession with “leading” from Washington? Who said the world seeks or desires “American leadership” (other then American politicians)? All the nations of Europe and Asia have civilizations, cultures and histories vastly older then ours.
If American politicians would just abandon their pretensions and just accept that they should simply run America, rather then the world, about which most of them actually know very little, the world would be a much better place.
Saying that Obama is ‘well intentioned’ seems like an exaggeration. It seems more just that he is basically sane, whereas Nuland/Power/Rodham-Clinton & the Neocons et al – the foreign-policy establishment – are ideologically crazy-bad, wedded to a mad belief system to which Obama gives only perfunctory obeisance.
Liberal Jewish Democrat Bernie Sanders has made it very clear that he will commit mass murder in the Ukraine and The Middle East so as to make The Ukraine and the Middle East friendlier to legalized homosexual marriage. There is a direct road from the Woodstock Summer of Peace!!!!…Luv!!!!!…and Sexual Debauchery!!!!! and Liberal Democrat Bernie Sanders’ monumentally murderous impulses towards Conservative Orthodox Christian Russians in the Ukraine and Conservative Muslims in the Middle East.
As the late Alex Cockburn use to refer to Vermont Liberal-Left Democrats:Vermont pwogwessives.
Bernie Sanders=thermonuclear mass murder in the name of legalized homo marriage!!!!…#FEEL THE BERN…#FEEL THE THERMONUCLEAR BURN!!!!!
Maybe at one time, there was an idealistic side to Hillary.
But now, she’s worse than Nixon.
She’s become a power-hungry crazy bitch.
She is this:
Video Link
Sanders is not really Jewish. He’s a bagel Jew, kinda like kosher style stuff that gentiles love to chew on.
pretty sure they are not interested in running the world, more like exploiting it for profit. every single country we fucked over in one form or another has always had something we wanted.
the U.S. President is “leader of the free world,”
Barry is, of course, the Leader of the Caged World.
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2016/1/18/peace-and-its-enemies
Peace And Its Enemies
January 18, 2016 / Gilad Atzmon
{Why are we “over there?”}
Mr. Giraldi: why were you in Turkey, working with anti-Christian Turks and Turkish MIT?
Why were you over there ?
What were you doing there that benefited the American taxpayer in any way ?
Not the various US Gov agencies or foreign interests: but the American taxpayer.
The average Joe and Jane in Anytown, USA.
Pretty hypocritical of you, Sir.
When you were getting paid to do who knows what working in a foreign country, a country which is anathema to everything Western/Christian civilization stands for – it was OK.
Because the American taxpayer dollars were flowing into your own pockets.
This is bullcrap. You are in denial (or attempting to mislead). If you can’t recognize the immediate threat all your geo-politicking is in vain. Putin and Trump disagree with you.
You are a sick mofo……human garbage.
Phil,
Since actions often lead to undesired consequences, wouldn’t it be far more accurate to state: …all of the unrest in the region is quite plausibly a direct or indirect result of American [and England’s] missteps, in creating the state of Israel in 1948.
Anonymous,
Forget what your grammar school teacher told you about the Gettysburg Address and take a look at what H.L. Mencken had to say about it:
The Gettysburg Address was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history… But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday reality! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth”. It is difficult to imagine anything more false and untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederate soldiers who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. H.L Mencken
Lying by US presidents may not have started with Abe Lincoln, but he came as close to perfecting the art as any president, before or since.
The “sick mofo”s are the Greedy Cheating sexually perverted White Liberal Male MEGA-CEOS who are enthusiastically murdering The Historic Native Born White American Working Class for reasons of enormous greed and repellant sexual perversion.
When the long overdue Native Born White American Working Class race-revolt commences…The Greedy Cheating White Liberal Male MEGA CEO will wish they were never born!!!!! They will be treated with extreme depravity.
There is no more vile scum in the whole of the Universe than the Greedy Cheating White Liberal Male MEGA-CEO……
You are entirely correct. The US invaded Canada in 1775, shortly after forming the Continental Army, and well before gaining independence from British rule. During the War OF 1812, they tried it a second time with similar results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Canada_(1775)
http://forgottenhistory.blogspot.com/2007/05/united-states-invades-canada.html
FIFY
He didn’t exactly lie, he just didn’t get to the point. Which is that you can fool enough of the people, enough of the time. It seemed obvious even the first time I heard it in school.
Probably would be.
It is both sad and tragic, that they key piece of “evidence” that precipitated the sanctions on the Iranian people, in the first place, was the incriminating “laptop” filled with bogus intelligence, most probably supplied by Israel through the MEK.
One would think in a normal world , this level of defrauding, once revealed, would lead not only to sanctions being lifted on Iran, but sanctions “imposed ” on Israel, for leading the world powers on a wild goose chase from the outset.
The idea that Israel, as a consolation prize, for the US “refraining” in obliterating its hated enemy, Iran, will be rewarded with an extra 1.1 billion in “military packages” per year, shows the whole world and Israel, the absolute worst lesson they could learn from this incident.
That for Israel,” fraud” pays.
…….and pays handsomely .
“or ISIL, or ISIS — or whatever — is.”
You’ve had a year and a half, and you still haven’t mastered the profound difference between ISIL and ISIS? No wonder the elites want to bring in millions and millions of people from the third world. If you are going to continue to lag like that, they may have to import another million each year.
Thank you for stating the obvious. It is that GD simple but the Treason Class will persist to the point of catastrophe in their sick worship of the foreigner.
I’m still holding my breath waiting for that Iraqi oil to flow into our tanks at deep discount. Last I heard the Iraqis were selling it to the Chinese with no cut for us. Libyan oil was already flowing to whoever wanted to buy it, mostly the Europeans IMSM. I don’t see where Libya fits your hypothesis.