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The Perils of “Indispensable Nation” Rhetoric

The U.S. has little at stake in the fight against ISIS, but Obama can't admit that without rejecting the "indispensable nation" conceit.

Kori Schake notes the gap between Obama’s rhetoric about the war against ISIS and the means he is willing to use:

But the case President Obama makes for war against the Islamic State is apocalyptic — the United States is absolutely invested in defeating ISIL, he claims. Obama believes we will win through very limited means, not that we have very limited interest in the outcome, which was Eisenhower’s view.

Obama’s problem here is that he has committed the U.S. to maximalist goal that isn’t necessary for U.S. security. He can’t justify a larger commitment of U.S. forces, because the war isn’t being fought for self-defense or even for the defense of real U.S. allies. Nonetheless, he still feels compelled to engage in rhetorical overkill to make military action seem like the right response, and as a sop to the hawks he says that the U.S. intends to “destroy” the group when he probably knows that this isn’t possible at an acceptable cost. Obama may realize that the war isn’t necessary for U.S. security, and has acknowledged that there is no direct threat to the U.S. that needs to be countered. That is one reason why he hasn’t yet yielded to the pressure for further escalation. Unfortunately, he has trapped himself again with careless rhetoric that hawks are now using to demand a larger, more costly intervention, and he can’t get out of the trap without repudiating many of the things he has already said about this war.

One of the more telling comments Obama made about this came in the 60 Minutes interview late last month. He once again fell back on American exceptionalist claptrap to defend the decision to intervene: “That’s how we [Americans] roll.” Someone at the White House must have thought this was very clever, since it is the portion of the interview that they chose to highlight on the official website. Whether he has embraced this nonsense in order to counter the charges that he doesn’t believe in a certain type of American exceptionalism, or whether he has done this because he genuinely believes it, the effect is the same: the U.S. is drawn into fighting wars that it doesn’t need to fight to uphold the vain conceit that America is “indispensable.” The truth is that the U.S. has little at stake in the fight against ISIS, but Obama can’t admit that without rejecting the “indispensable nation” conceit that he has relied on to support many of his worst foreign policy decisions.

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