...But That Was When I Ruled The World (With My Big Stick)

Is there anything more hilarious and sad than the right wing hysteria on Obama's foreign policy?

Sure, the "socialist economic policies" diatribes are amusingly off point... but conservatives have been so wrong on economic issues for so long that even they seem well aware that they can only stamp their feet while the parade passes them by. But on foreign policy... well, gosh darn it, they're serious... and they know stuff.

Of course, much - okay, most - of what passes for "deep thought" on foreign policy from the right comes down to the "big stick" theory of defense policy. If you can shoot it, hit it, or run a tank over it... well, I got your foreign policy, right here.

I'm even sympathetic, a little - in the Bush years, as everything about conservatism was reduced to caricature, the last thing to prop up a failing sense of right wing dominance was... well, that big stick.

Any guy will tell you... it's a sad day when you can't get it up anymore.

It's humbling, after all, to face that we can't beat everything into submission, that merely rattling that pistol in our pants can't get us everything we want. That's one reason I think lefties have nothing to concede about "the surge worked"... it did... but we had other options, ones we never tried.

Conservative hysteria, since Obama began his trip to Europe has been amazingly dense. First, they insisted - along with many "policy experts" - that Obama faced an impossible situation at the G20, that he'd alienated our best ally (Gordon Brown), and faced impossible intransigence from Sarkozy and Merkel. Turns out... not so much; Brown and Obama made clear that they were on the same page, while Sarkozy, by pretty much every estimation, folded like a cheap chair (not hard, considering the demand for "more regulation" is about as lefty as it gets).

Obama's willingness to listen to others, to find reasonable compromises, to expect a meeting like the G20 to actually produce outcomes... these are not remarkable ideas, or signs of weakness; but they do reflect a different way of doing things. And as with domestic policy, two things become apparent the "conservative alternative" - first that much of their supposed "strength" on the subject is debatable at best... and the fears that drive their approach deserve to be taken apart, and dismissed.

That's become especially clear on nuclear proliferation (which feels like the issue we'll be stuck with all my life... I remember these exact discussions when I was 12. In the seventies). Despite all the hand wringing and cries that rogue states will get the bomb any minute... neither Iran nor North Korea have quite panned out as the kind of threat the right sees. North Korea's "missile test" (or "satellite firing" in their terms), turned out to mostly be a dud. And American willingness, under Obama, to work on neotiated settlements seems able to keep both countries at least at the table.

Which is not the worst place to be.  Personally, I'd rather be a lover than a fighter; what the right misses, I think, is that there's many ways to wield that stick, that we have power in our ability to affect change, to press for the ideas we believe in, rather than force change at the point of a gun (which, after all, is a lousy way to promote a "freedom agenda" or whatever it is that Bush babbled about in that incoherent second inaugural address).

And ultimately, thanks to all that gunplay of the Bush years, we don' have much choice; we squandered much of our effectiveness as a militray power proving that all out guns and money could barely amount to a worthwhile outcome in Iraq. Or Afghanistan (or Korea and Vietnam, just to be clear how long this has been going on). Our power to rattle the sabre and force results is far less than it was... and it's largely because the right's swaggering approach to foreign policy squandered it.

In the end, I don't think that's so bad; I think our period of world dominance, as much as it might be good to advance our American ideas of equality and freedom, came along with our bad habits of waste, casual indifference to the suffering of some (for the good of the many), and endless emphasis on needless consumerism. As nice and well meaning as we might be, as Americans we don't see ourselves at all for what we are, or what we can do, and why it might cause problems for others. Conservatives, whether dealing foreign or domestically, need to adapt to the new world... that they can't, as much as anything, keeps arguing for their obsolescence.

Now, as we sweep the streets we used to own, we don't have the luxury we used to of just assuming we can have our way... no matter how big our stick. And maybe we can finally face the lies we've told ourselves... about sticks and all those other metaphors ... when we accept that we no longer rule the world.

Comments

[jinb]

I'm more concerned with similarities between the Obama and Bush administrations than I am with their differences.

Have you been reading Glenn Greenwald? Obama has actually upped the ante on a president's ability to break laws. Not good.