The approach of Christmas and the New Year have left me speechless. Well. Almost.
Meanwhile, this review of recent presidents’ foreign policy performance by Martin Gurri is well worth a read. For just a small taste, here is a succinct distillation of Obama’s historicist view of America in global affairs:
Obama was persuaded that he had cut the Gordian knot of great power politics. This breakthrough depended less on old-fashioned strategic maneuvers than on a cluster of personal attitudes and attributes, none more important than “smart.” Hillary Clinton, his first secretary of state, called the new approach “smart power.” Obama himself, being power-allergic, preferred to speak in terms of “a smart foreign policy” and “a smarter kind of American leadership.”
To be smart meant to discern how sharply the present had broken with the past. Obama is an unequivocal historicist. His rhetoric assumed that human events move in a predetermined direction, and that a select band of extra-smart minds, armed with masses of data, could shepherd the country and the world into the inevitable future, of which he was a messenger and a representative.
Oh, how that smarts!
People who are too much dazzled by their own genius can be the most dangerous of all, it seems to me. They can act meekly for fear of looking stupid by being too hasty, but then they want to apply highly self-flattering analysis after the fact to rationalize why they were, in fact, right all along: Because they were and are immutably genius, so incredibly smart. And since you can’t re-run the experiment, there’s no disproving their bold self-confidence: It’s all self-justifying, self-reinforcing, self-deluding to a remarkable degree.
From the mothership, something a little different:
Worth Your Time II: 'Election 2024: You Asked For It, America'--Kevin D. Williamson
https://tinyurl.com/5e82kpju
I dispute the notion that Obama was not interested in power. As I recall, he ran for POTUS. As I also recall, when asked why about some policy decision, he said "because we won." That's the answer of a man enjoying his power. It's like the power of a parent or boss whi sats,"because I said so. "