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Obama Is Not Bush, But He Is Not Necessarily The Anti-Bush

Jacob Weisberg is wrong in this recent article, but not for the reason Joseph Bottum claims. Weisberg wrote: In so doing, Obama now faces an inverted set of hazards: getting overcommitted in Afghanistan, putting too much faith in the United Nations, accommodating dictators instead of standing up to them. Most alarmingly, given all that his […]

Jacob Weisberg is wrong in this recent article, but not for the reason Joseph Bottum claims. Weisberg wrote:

In so doing, Obama now faces an inverted set of hazards: getting overcommitted in Afghanistan, putting too much faith in the United Nations, accommodating dictators instead of standing up to them. Most alarmingly, given all that his predecessor did to discredit them, Obama has failed to stand up for the broader ideas of democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. Surely if not for Bush, Obama’s instinct after the Iranian election would have been to identify with those risking their lives to free their country, not to get back to his attempt at dialogue with Ahmadinejad.

This led Bottum to whine:

Bush, you see, was so bad that he’s still making Obama make mistakes. The evil of Bush was so evil that, in recoiling from it, the righteous understandably go too far in the opposite direction.

This isn’t Weisberg’s point at all. While he may believe it to be the case, Weisberg isn’t claiming in this article that Bush was unusually incompetent or prone to error. On the contrary, he is saying that Obama’s reaction against Bush’s errors fits a pattern of behavior that all Presidents in the last forty years have practiced. Weisberg is arguing that Obama is overreacting and making mistakes in trying to be the anti-Bush, just as Bush’s foreign policy blunders both before and after 9/11 derived from a burning need to be the anti-Clinton, and so on. The main problem with Weisberg’s interpretation is that it gets almost everything about Obama’s foreign policy badly wrong.

On the surface, it appeared that there were going to be numerous corrections from the mistakes of the previous administration, but more often than not continuity has been the theme. Even on India, where Obama seemed to be wrecking improved bilateral relations built up by Bush, Obama has swung back around to pursuing similar policies. The trouble is that this means that Obama is following Bush in one of the few international relationships he handled correctly and also continues to follow him in his otherwise dreadful handling of foreign policy. If Obama has not yet embarked on some new foolhardy “humanitarian” intervention, my advice is this: wait. The main thing preventing him from pursuing such a course is the simple lack of resources imposed on his administration by the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan. It certainly isn’t for lack of figures on the NSC who are well-known for their well-intentioned belligerence.

The only people caught in what Weisberg calls the “dialectical rut” are the pundits and other observers who remain invested in the idea that Obama represents something significantly different from Bush when it comes to the substance and goals of foreign policy. For them, Obama may be better, he may be worse, but he is definitely quite different. The problem with this analysis is that it just flat wrong when it comes to substance and goals. For the first six months of this year, I entertained some small hope, vain as it proved to be, that Russia policy would not be self-defeating, Iran policy would be less counterproductive, and the general conduct of foreign affairs would be more responsible. That hope was apparently badly misplaced. It is a measure of how badly Bush performed, how horribly McCain would have done, and how terrifyingly dangerous Biden is that Obama as President remains the least bad alternative available at the moment.

Weisberg’s claim that Obama would have publicly identified with the protesters in Iran but for the example of Bush is wrong. This claim is clearly driven by Weisberg’s belief that Obama ought to have identified with the protesters, and the only way to explain his failure to do so explicitly is to pin it on overreaction to Bush’s excessive support for “color” revolutions in several countries and his militant pursuit of democracy promotion. Refusing to identify with the protesters was not an over-correction to Bush’s democratist excess, but was instead the tactical, cautious move that the administration claimed that it was. In other words, it was not an error, but a decision made with the actual well-being of the protesters in mind. If Bush would have engaged in some obnoxious grandstanding that would have led to a harsher crackdown and additional civilian deaths, it is hardly Obama’s failure that he did something else.

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