openpolitics.com

He’s an isolationist with drones and special-operations forces.

.. “You could call me a realist in believing we can’t relieve all the world’s misery,” Obama muses to Goldberg.

.. For Obama, as Goldberg paraphrases No. 44, “the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests”; even if it were, “an American president could do little to make it a better place.”

.. A realist knows that distant threats, if ignored, can turn into direct ones. Hence, the “precautionary principle”—better to act than wait in the face of risks not fully known—that is so dear to climate warriors like Obama serves as another pillar of the realist faith.

.. Obama pulled back and invited the Russians in, never mind that Henry Kissinger had essentially kicked them out of the Middle East in the 1970s—pushing them out of Egypt, Russia’s main stronghold in the region, by bringing then-President Anwar al-Sadat into the American camp. Mr. Putin was delighted to oblige Mr. Obama, and there went 40 years of American primacy in the world’s most critical arena.

.. This is what happens when U.S.-made vacuums beckon. Now, realists don’t haveto fight every battle. The Brits did nicely as the “offshore balancer” who engineered the coalitions that laid low the hegemonist du jour, from Habsburg to Hitler.

..“Free riders aggravate me,” he tells Goldberg, betraying a grievous misunderstanding of what it means to be the world’s No. 1. A measure of free-riding is a given whenever a very strong power consorts with a bunch of weaker ones.

.. Even Israel has struck a separate deal with Mr. Putin: We’ll let you prosecute your air war against America’s anti-Assad allies, if you don’t interfere with our attacks against Hezbollah’s arms pipeline from Iran to Lebanon.

 .. Nor do you have to grow up in gangland to know that street cred in the global arena depends on a reputation for violence that will render force unnecessary.

.. “Obama believes that history has sides”—this is how Goldberg sums up the president’s faith. “America’s adversaries—and some of its putative allies—have situated themselves on the wrong one, a place where tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and militarism still flourish. What they don’t understand is that history is bending in his direction.”

.. This is not grand strategy. It is religion. Yet the central myths of Judeo-Christianity are the Pharaonic Slavery and the Crucifixion. They warn that tragedy comes before redemption.