He got rolled by the Russians...but he is in good company. He made a good point with Africa/Ghana, but again he's in good company if and when they ignore him as they have everybody else.
Will foreign affairs trap Obama?
By Ralph Peters
The tragedy of every Democratic administration since Lyndon B. Johnson took office has been that presidents reach the White House with a strong domestic agenda and little interest in foreign affairs — only to see their programs eclipsed by distant crises. An essential question facing the United States today is whether President Obama will extend this costly pattern.
(Illustration by Web Bryant, USA TODAY)
Mention LBJ and the immediate association is Vietnam. Yet, Johnson was the president of the "Great Society," the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the "war on poverty," and Medicare and Medicaid. Shaped by the Great Depression, Johnson's career as a legislator had been devoted to domestic concerns. But the conflagration in Indochina, which his errors fueled, consumed his presidency. Worn out by Vietnam's frustrations, LBJ declined to run for re-election.
President Carter came to office intent on setting a new moral tone in the wake of Watergate and the brief caretaker presidency of Gerald Ford. But Carter's program of moral regeneration is long forgotten. His single term in office conjures memories of American hostages tormented by Iranian revolutionaries; his paralysis in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets he trusted;and foreign-engineered oil shortages that ravaged our economy.
Profoundly concerned with Americans left behind by economic progress, President Clinton devoted his fabled intellect to domestic issues. But foreign crises nagged his every step. Setting aside the personal scandals that dogged him, the first images summoned by Clinton's presidency don't include a balanced budget or a stunning run of economic growth. Instead, we recall his inept handling of the aftermath of the "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia, his neglect of the Rwanda massacre, his confused responses to an ever-shrinking Yugoslavia, and the largely uncontested rise of al-Qaeda.
A peripheral concern
These presidents shared an impassioned desire to improve American lives. Johnson remembered the Dust Bowl, Carter the Jim Crow world of the Old South, and Clinton life on the other side of the tracks. International affairs seemed peripheral to them. Then, in office, each behaved naively on the world stage, and the curtain fell heavily on their presidencies.
Certainly, Republican administrations had serious failures in the same historical span — not least Richard Nixon's ethical collapse. Republican presidents, too, faced long gas lines, economic downturns and overseas dilemmas. But Nixon left a strong, if uneven, foreign-policy legacy; Reagan — the most single-minded president since Lincoln — triumphed over a frightful, longstanding adversary without firing a shot; George H.W. Bush had the best foreign-policy preparation of any modern president; and the jury of history (if not that of the news media) remains out on George W. Bush's foreign endeavors.
The advantage shared by Republican presidents is simply that they never expected the world to behave. Even Reagan, an imperturbable idealist, grasped that effective idealism demands a realist's willingness to see the world as it is, rather than as one wishes it to be.
Now we have a president who's highly intelligent, charismatic and possessed of a canny sense of politics. He proposes the grandest alterations to American society of any president since LBJ. But Obama is a babe in the tangled woods of global affairs.
With the exception of his undergraduate infatuation with nuclear disarmament, Obama never took the least interest in international relations or world history. Despite his youthful years in Indonesia and stints in Kenya, it was America's domestic challenges that captivated him. Obama came to office armed with confidence, rather than experience, in foreign policy — coupled to an elusive sense of Washington's global role.
Obama has compounded the chances that he'll fall into the pattern of a half-century of Democratic presidents by choosing a secretary of State with little background for the job (artfully sidelining a competitor) then appointing an unprecedented array of special envoys, drawing authority away from Foggy Bottom and concentrating it in the White House. But a power transfer that worked in the early Henry Kissinger era may not succeed for a president already warned by former secretary of State Colin Powell against attempting to do too many big things at once.
Idealism vs. naivety
As predicted by his vice president, Obama has been challenged by foreign actors within his first six months in office. And the array is daunting: Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan-Pakistan, Russia, Israel-Palestine, the machinations of Hugo Chavez, crises in Mexico and Honduras, China's strategic pranks and, not least, a global economic crisis. Thus far, Obama has appeared to stray to the wrong side of the line dividing idealism from naivety. He has counted on his personal powers of persuasion to find harmony with those, such as the Iranians or North Koreans, who view statecraft as a zero-sum game; he has looked for promises from others, such as the Palestinians or Russians, who have routinely broken them; and he has imagined that a forthcoming spirit would seduce those, such as Chavez or the Castro brothers, whose lives are dedicated to exclusive ideologies. Whether speaking of his counterparts in Beijing, Tehran or Islamabad, Obama has committed the common beginner's error of declining to see the world through the other man's skeptical eyes.
Our president is reportedly a quick study. His Chicago years show that he has survival skills. His energy seems unprecedented, and he assumed office in a gush of international goodwill. But Obama will have to grasp that Tehran is an even tougher place than the South Side of Chicago. Not every foreign leader can be talked around to our president's view of the world.
Obama has the innate abilities to break the cycle of Democratic presidents devoured by foreign affairs. Now he must demonstrate that he has the wisdom.
Ralph Peters is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors, Fox News' strategic analyst, and the author of the novel The War After Armageddon, scheduled to be published in September
