Obama and Foreign Policy

This man wants to be our next president. He also wants to provide a new and unprecedented direction for our foreign policy, a policy that would allow him to engage in talks with our enemies with no pre-conditions. To be kind let me say that this is very naive on the part of the Senator.

I am a critic of our foreign policy because I believe that we are not very good at it. Part of the problem lies within the State Department itself. Civil Service people, that can't be fired unless hell freezes over and that's in their contract, have their own agenda. Richard Nixon, love him or hate him, knew the State Department and upon becoming president let it be known that he was going to be his own Secretary of Defense. This department is full of people who believe they know best and have been know to overrule the president's wishes.

The other problem is who we are. We have been the big kid on the block for a very long time. We were aware of that and as such we have backed off of issues involving foreign policy because we were concerned with not offending our friends or having others call us an imperialistic nation. The fix is not to go belly up and pander to others. Someone has to be strong in a crisis.

In a previous blog I noted the failed diplomatic efforts of Woodrow Wilson in his handling of the peace. Wilson is interesting in that he skillfully kept us out of the war albeit he did make some errors notably favoring England and not acting on the Lusitania incident. His actions after the war, particularly showing up at Versailles with the intent of running the show was a tragedy. The English and French officials took him to the woodshed and showed him the way of the world. Moral of that story, send the Secretary of State or someone else to prepare the way.

If Wilson were the only president who erred in foreign policy we could end right here but he wasn't. FDR's record is bad on the peace as is Truman's. JFK got beat up by Khrushcev in Berlin and over Cuba. LBJ did not do a good job in handling Viet Nam and Jimmy Carter messed up in Iran. I believe that judgement is still out on Reagan and the mess in Lebanon and George H.W. Bush's actions in the first Gulf War. However, from FDR to Bush, all of them had one thing in common, they did not jauntily walk into the lion's den and say let's talk because they all knew what had happened to Wilson. His actions caused him not only the loss of his dream, the League of Nations, but we ended up signing a separate peace with Germany.

Now comes the Senator from Illinois who wants to sit down with the likes of Chavez, Castro, and Ahmadinijad. He wants to do so without any pre-conditions on the meetings. This isn't even close to a win, win scenario. This is what we will get if we put a man with unrealistic expectations into the White House in 2009. Senator Obama will have his head handed to him just as Hitler did to Chamberlain.