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No Surprises Here

John Cole urges me to say something about Max Boot’s latest display of cluelessness, so how can I refuse? Boot is evidently stunned and “gobsmacked” by Obama’s national security and economic policy appointments, and their “moderation” overwhelms him. His administration already “exceeds expectations”! Well, I suppose if you were a fool who thought Obama represented […]

John Cole urges me to say something about Max Boot’s latest display of cluelessness, so how can I refuse? Boot is evidently stunned and “gobsmacked” by Obama’s national security and economic policy appointments, and their “moderation” overwhelms him. His administration already “exceeds expectations”! Well, I suppose if you were a fool who thought Obama represented McGovernite “neo-isolationism,” or whatever it was interventionists were calling it, and thought, as Ralph Peters did, that Obama’s Presidency would be a series of retreats and capitulations abroad, you would be stunned. Then again, this is the genius who tried to tell people that he is not a neocon and has tried to claim that various American deployments in the Caribbean and Latin America in the early 20th century were not driven by an effort to secure U.S. business interests. As John noted, Bacevich derided Boot in The Limits of Power for his hyperbolic praise of American military power:

Boot dubbed this the Doctrine of the Big Enchilada. Within a year, after U.S. troops had occupied Baghdad, he went further: America’s army even outclassed Germany’s Wehrmacht. The master displayed in knocking off Saddam, Boot gushed, made “fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison.”

All of this turned out to be hot air [bold mine-DL]. If the global war on terror had produced on undeniable conclusion, it is this: Estimates of U.S. military capabilities have turned out to be wildly overstated. The Bush administration’s misplaced confidence in the efficacy of American arms represents a strategic misjudgement that has cost our country dearly. Even in an age of stealth, precision weapons, and instant communications, armed force is not a panacea. Even in a supposedly unipolar era, American military power turned out to be quite limited.

In short, Boot has been wrong about almost everything he has commented on over the last decade, and his neo-imperialist nostalgia for pith helmets and jodhpurs, which he expressed early on after 9/11, is fueled by a fundamentally flawed understanding of American power and the ends to which that power should be directed. Today’s post is not so remarkable in light of that record. Had Boot been paying any attention over the last year and a half to Obama’s actual policy statements, he would have also noticed that no less than Robert Kagan was praising the exuberant interventionism in Obama’s earliest foreign policy addresses. Obama’s Chicago Global Affairs Council speech from last year prompted Kagan to go so far as to say this:

America must “lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.” With those words, Barack Obama put an end to the idea that the alleged overexuberant idealism and America-centric hubris of the past six years is about to give way to a new realism, a more limited and modest view of American interests, capabilities and responsibilities.

Indeed, compared to the content of that early speech the selections of Gates and Jones to his national security team are “moderate”–but only when compared to Obama’s own interventionist rhetoric in the past. There is some reason to think that there we will see some combination of a new Scowcroftian realism, represented by Gates, and the ambitious interventionism that Obama has laid out in more than just this one speech. There are plenty of reasons for concern that even Gates does not really have “a more limited and modest view of American interests, capabilities and responsibilities,” given his continued reckless support for NATO expansion, but if anything Gates and Jones are likely to have a restraining influence on the activist foreign policy Obama has laid out time and time again. Contrary to Boot, the national security appointments do not spell an end to proposed withdrawal timetables and negotiations with “rogue” states, but then people who have never understood how modest and qualified Obama’s withdrawal position was and who have never understood that negotiations with Iran are aimed at the same goal of halting Iran’s nuclear program would not be able to see this.

P.S. Clemons makes some important points about what keeping Gates will mean.

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