Thursday, July 16, 2015

Ratifying Retreat

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, certainly no conservative, writes about the President's press conference defending the Iran nuclear deal, entitling his column:
Obama’s news conference was a case for American weakness.
Milbank says of President Obama:
He ultimately acknowledged that the United States just doesn’t have the clout to enforce its will. This was an undercurrent of the whole news conference Wednesday afternoon, and of Obama’s overall defense of the Iran deal. He was tough and strong, but in service of the argument that American power is limited — that this is the best deal we could get with our declining leverage. His defenders call it realism; it also may amount to ratifying retreat.

Mostly what came through was a defense of what future historians may describe as the Obama doctrine: an America that recognizes the limits of its power and acts less ambitiously.
Milbank approves of Obama's "realism." We do not. U.S. power is limited because Obama believes it to be so, because he wishes it so, because he sees our power as a force for evil in the world. As you might expect, we disagree categorically.