Responding to Lee Smith’s latest silly interpretation of Obama’s foreign policy (this time it’s anti-colonialism), Zack Beauchamp writes:

Anti-colonialism doesn’t just mean opposition to the status quo: it means opposition to colonialism.

There is an argument that Smith could have used to push his anti-colonialist reading of Obama’s decisions, but that would have involved treating the U.S. as a neo-colonial power, and that is something Smith would never do. It would also require him to demonstrate that Obama intends to reduce the U.S. role in the region, and there is scant evidence of this. Count Smith’s article as another piece of evidence that “anti-colonialism” has become the foreign policy equivalent of crying socialism in response to anything Obama does. As usual, the truth is much more mundane: Obama is a conventional liberal internationalist abroad, and a center-left corporatist at home.

Let’s remember that this is the same Lee Smith who thought that Obama’s inconsistent, case-by-case response to uprisings in the Near East and North Africa was informed by an appreciation of Pan-Islamism. Smith speculated back in March:

For the purposes of making policy, the many peoples of the world belong to states that are broken down into allies, rivals (friendly and less friendly), and enemies. But this is not how Obama sees the Middle East. Instead, he sees it in terms of an undifferentiated people who need to be convinced that the United States is unbigoted and indeed friendly toward their hopes and dreams.

The problem is that there is no such undifferentiated mass of people. Rather, there are a variety of Muslim sects (e.g., Sunni and Shia), countries (e.g., Iran and Saudi Arabia), and centers of power (e.g., regimes and opposition movements) with a wide array of interests that in many cases cannot be reconciled. Obama approached them all as if Pan-Islamism were alive and well, and not a discredited and failed ideology of half a century ago.

It’s understandable that Smith abandoned this absurd theory in favor of his new absurd theory. The heart of his argument four months ago was that Obama’s policy was incoherent because he pushed Mubarak to give up power, but left Gaddafi alone. Four months later, we can only wish that Obama had been so “incoherent.” The funny thing is that Smith’s new argument makes the error he attributes to Obama: he treats an ideology that flourished a half-century ago as if it were the key to explaining Obama’s policy decisions. This is all the more bizarre given that the continuities between Bush and Obama in foreign policy are many and obvious.