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Beware

In the next issue of TAC (2/25), Brendan O’Neill provides an excellent summary of the case against Obama, focusing on his hyper-ambitious interventionism.  Here’s a short excerpt: Obama’s stress on how everything is interconnected not only sets up the United States to intervene everywhere, but it makes any coherent strategy impossible.  If every problem is an […]

In the next issue of TAC (2/25), Brendan O’Neill provides an excellent summary of the case against Obama, focusing on his hyper-ambitious interventionism.  Here’s a short excerpt:

Obama’s stress on how everything is interconnected not only sets up the United States to intervene everywhere, but it makes any coherent strategy impossible.  If every problem is an American problem, how would Obama set priorities or address one crisis instead of another?  It’s a question he hasn’t begun to answer.

Obviously, I agree with this analysis entirely, and I’m pleased to see this view of Obama catching on with others.  As I said in one of my first responses to Obama’s Council on Global Affairs speech:

Obama believes that by stressing interdependence and globalisation that he has seriously addressed complexity in foreign affairs, but he has simply replaced one rigid scheme with another, and in that scheme every problem on earth is potentially our problem.  If every problem is our problem, and everyone’s security is “inextricably linked” to our own, how can any President set priorities or address one crisis rather than another when all are potentially just as relevant and connected to American security?  

If there is any temptation to make comparisons with McGovern ’72, it should be clear after reading this that no one could be more vehemently opposed to the idea that America should come home than Barack Obama.  The two major party candidates offer competing hegemonist visions, and both of them are dreadful, but there are grounds for thinking that an antiwar voter has more to lose overall by backing Obama, which should be a sobering reality for those who understand how dangerous McCain is.  Far from challenging the “mindset” that led to the war in Iraq, Obama possesses the very same mindset that says that we govern the world and must police it.

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