Thursday Open Thread [5.8.14]

Jon Meacham of Time:

Dismissing the possibilities of direct military action in Syria and Ukraine, Obama said, “Where we can make a difference using all the tools we’ve got in the toolkit, well, we should do so. And if there are occasions where targeted, clear actions can be taken that would make a difference, then we should take them. We don’t do them because somebody sitting in an office in Washington or New York thinks it would look strong. That’s not how we make foreign policy.” The way it is made, he said, “may not always be sexy. That may not always attract a lot of attention, and it doesn’t make for good argument on Sunday morning shows. But it avoids errors. You hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run. But we steadily advance the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world.”

To Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Obama’s Manila soliloquy was one of whining and whinging: “The American President should not perpetually use the word eventually. And he should not set a tone of resignation with references to this being a relay race and say he’s willing to take ‘a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf,’ and muse that things may not come ‘to full fruition on your timetable’ … A singles hitter doesn’t scare anybody … It doesn’t feel like leadership. It doesn’t feel like you’re in command of your world.”

The sound you may hear in the background is that of the goalposts of American punditry being moved up and down the field. Not so long ago the common wisdom held that Bush 43 was shredding our alliances with a swaggering unilateralism, refusing to acknowledge the complexities of the early 21st century world. Now, in the blink of the historical eye, Obama is being routinely maligned as professorial, an ineffective multilateralist (a damning combination, that) who is acting like a latter-day Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary who was willing to entertain the possibility of talks with the Axis in 1940. From the perspective of as serious an observer as Charles Krauthammer, Obama’s foreign policy is a catalog of compounding weakness from Syria to Ukraine and beyond.

Yet Obama is choosing limited action in many spheres because he believes that more expansive action may create more problems than it would solve. He is a pragmatist who has always been depicted, particularly by his opponents, as an ideologue. Obama’s vision of U.S. power is much more in keeping with John Quincy Adams’ adage that we should not seek out monsters to destroy than with the muscular globalism of Bush’s second Inaugural Address, a speech that argued America’s overriding purpose was to end tyranny wherever it might flourish.

American foreign policy has proved most effective when it has found itself somewhere between Adams and Bush. In modern times, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush tended to exercise national power in ways that balanced democratic idealism with political realism. Depending on the moment, they reached out or held back, projected power or kept the powder dry. The art of decision often—not always but ­often—­benefits from a cautious ­weighing of the relative costs of action and inaction. Lord knows, we get things wrong—we have fought unwise wars, ignored the plights of persecuted peoples, sent contradictory signals—but by and large, generation in and generation out, we have, in British journalist and economist Walter Bagehot’s phrase, muddled through.