He can make a respectable speech on a Normandy beach, but he’s probably the first U.S. president for whom the Allied landing is emotionally remote. ~Roger Cohen

Cohen’s column is filled with several of these incredibly insulting statements, which he probably thinks are neutral observations. He hasn’t been this helpful since he claimed that Obama could form a bridge with the Islamic world, or when he claimed that more needed to be written about Obama’s extended family.

Obviously, I have no idea whether the Normandy landing is “emotionally remote” for Obama, and neither does Cohen, but the point is that no one would claim such a thing about Obama’s Boomer predecessors for whom WWII was just as far removed from their experience. That didn’t stop Clinton and Bush from trotting out WWII precedents and repeated warnings about the next Hitler, the next fascist enemy, or the next Munich to justify military actions all over the world. Despite their relative lack of political experience during the Cold War, they remained captive to security structures and foreign policy commitments Cold War Presidents before them had created. Whether they were “marked” by Cold War events or not, their policies were certainly shaped by their embrace of Cold War mentalities with respect to Russia and NATO expansion. Viewed one way, it might be a very good thing if Obama were not nearly as haunted by WWII and the Cold War as so many foreign policy hawks seem to be. Even so, he is operating under the same constraints and in the shadow of the same precedents as Clinton and Bush, and his actual policies vis-a-vis Europe have hardly differed at all.

Let’s remember that the Allied landing at Normandy occurred almost 66 years ago. A full three generations have been born and come of age since then. There are many tens of millions of Americans, some of whom had ancestors fighting in Europe, who have no particular connection to Normandy. My grandfather fought at Kasserine, Salerno and Monte Cassino, and my great-uncle died fighting at Iwo Jima, so Normandy has far less meaning for me. One might say that it is “emotionally remote” for us. What is unusual is the degree to which our Presidents continue to pay special attention to D-Day over six decades after it happened and out of all proportion to its effect on the outcome of the European war. There is no particular public veneration for the Inchon landing for a number of reasons, but that changes nothing about U.S. policy on the Korean Peninsula. If Obama’s “feelings” are more tied to “the Pacific,” does that connect him more to the experience of the Korean and Vietnam Wars? Those were fairly significant Cold War events that had less to do with Europeans, but apparently these do not count. Do his supposedly Pacific-tied feelings make the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa more emotionally meaningful to him?