... the Mice Will Play

Writing at Breaking Defense, James Kitfield describes the disaster that has been the Obama foreign policy, in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a major player.

In just the past year the administration has been forced to rush U.S. troops back to Iraq and then reinforce them, and launch sustained airstrikes over both Iraq and Syria targeting the Islamic State. Planned U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan this year have been frozen in the face of a resurgent Taliban, and military experts continue to criticize the administration’s deadline for withdrawing all U.S. troops by the end of next year. The Pentagon also just announced the redeployment of battle tanks and heavy armored equipment back to Europe to calm the nerves of NATO allies shaken by Russian aggression in Ukraine.

What’s most remarkable about those reversals is how rapidly an Obama Doctrine of international retrenchment and domestic renewal — coupled with political paralysis and a budget impasse in Washington that have severely degraded military readiness — left a perceived global power vacuum. It has rapidly been filled by bad actors behaving very badly, creating a narrative of U.S. retreat that is proving hard to dispel.

Exactly the same thing happens when we forego foreign intervention as when the police forego proactive enforcement, a surge in misbehavior. The U.S. "cat" is away, and we all know what that tells those reprobate mice ... playtime!