Ray Takeyh takes ludicrous misreadings of Obama’s foreign policy to their logical conclusion:

In fact, Obama is best understood as a throwback to the mid-1970s, equal parts George McGovern and Henry Kissinger [bold mine-DL].

As a description of what Obama has done in the last five years, this is nonsensical, but it is a reasonably good description of the fantasy record that certain hawks have imagined for him. When it has suited them to attack Obama for weakness, they have relied on caricaturing him as a new McGovern: the supposed “neo-isolationist” intent on withdrawing from the world and “choosing” American decline. In order to do this, they have to ignore all of the many decisions Obama has made that contradict this on everything from Afghanistan to Ukraine, including more than a few decisions that would have appalled McGovern, and pretend that this isn’t part of his record. When they have found him lacking in sufficient zeal for democracy promotion or too reluctant to throw support behind various protest movements and rebellions around the world, they then suddenly discover that he isn’t McGovern at all, but rather an arch-realist. That requires them to ignore the occasions when Obama has given in to his liberal interventionist impulses and committed the U.S. to fight wars that had absolutely nothing to do with U.S. security or interests.

Leon Wieseltier is one such hawk who has made a habit of berating Obama for his imaginary similarity to Kissinger. He has gone so far as to call Obama “Kissinger’s epigone,” which would require the reader to know nothing about either man in order to take that claim seriously. Hawks don’t make this comparison because there is merit to it, but because it allows them to express their loathing of Obama in terms that both liberal hawks and neoconservatives can appreciate and share. This also conveniently overlooks how often Kissinger has sided with these same hawks on major foreign policy questions over the decades. Obama’s hawkish critics want to to treat Obama as some sort of bizarre mixture of McGovern and Kissinger, because that allows them to fall back on all of their most tired tropes about “strength” and “moral clarity.” The somewhat boring reality that Obama is a conventional center-left internationalist with mostly hawkish instincts doesn’t fit the fantasy record that hawkish critics have invented for him, and so they ignore it and create an equally fantastical Obama to match it. They need Obama to be some hybrid holdover from the 1970s, because these hawks are still by and large arguing with their old opponents from forty years ago. If one is looking for “anachronistic and stale” foreign policy arguments, the hawks have them in abundance.