Wriggling In The Shackles

Peter Beinart says Obama's foreign policy has failed:

It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Obama’s plight. In both Israel/Palestine and Afghanistan, he inherited a deteriorating situation on the ground, and a political debate in Washington that dramatically constrains his ability to respond. But the promise of the Obama campaign was that the old constraints would no longer apply, that policymakers would have the courage and creativity to respond in fundamentally different ways.

It’s a bit like the situation John F. Kennedy inherited in 1961. As a thoughtful, sophisticated man, he could see that the Cold War discourse he had inheritedwhich was premised on a unified communist threatbore little resemblance to reality, now that the USSR and China were at each other’s throat. Yet for all his promises to “think anew,” he never effectively challenged the politically comfortable assumptions that imprisoned his foreign policy. And as a result, he continued down the path toward war in Vietnam. I hope I’m proven wrong, but right now it’s easy to imagine historians saying of Obama what they sometimes said of Kennedy: that he was smarter than he was brave.