Obama's foreign policy strategy released.

The White House is calling it "strategic patience", and they're being widely mocked.

Foreign Policy article

The White House’s new national security policy, issued Friday, urges a long-term view of confronting conflict in a world awash with urgent crises. It served as more of a defense of President Barack Obama’s response to threats rather than offering a new direction, and bolsters his belief that acting deliberatively now could stave off worse threats later.

“Progress won’t be quick or linear,” National Security Advisor Susan Rice told an audience at the Brookings Institution think-tank, where she unveiled the strategy — the second and likely final policy document of its kind for the Obama administration.

“But we are committed to seizing the future that lies beyond the crisis of the day, and pursuing a vision of the world as it can and should be,” Rice said.

Seize the future! Look beyond the crisis of the day (and every day seems to bring a new one), and pursue a vision of the world - where we all join hands, sing kumbaya, and blame each foreseeable and predictable disaster on bad luck, spontaneous demonstrations, and Youtube videos that nobody even watched.

It was an attempt to push back on the criticism that for years has been heaped on Obama for failing to quickly deal with crises — including the rise of the Islamic State and Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine — that have erupted on his watch. Rice urged a policy of “strategic patience” that allows America to prove its power when it must, but as often resists reflexive responses that could ensnare the U.S. in long-term conflicts.

They're really calling it "strategic patience". I could see Conan O'Brien calling it that, and I could see all the other world leaders derisively calling it that, but now US foreign policy openly mocks itself.

A White House summary of the strategy, released ahead of Rice’s remarks, repeatedly highlighted the administration’s intent to lead — in partnerships, with military power, and “with a long-term perspective, influencing the trajectory of major shifts in the security landscape today in order to secure our national interests in the future.”

The only major trajectory they've influenced so far is to turn the Middle East into flames, perhaps overseeing the collapse of the concept of an Arab nation state, plus the return of the Cold War.

That is a clear pushback to lawmakers, policy experts, and prominent U.S. journalists who have lambasted the White House for “leading from behind” — a catchphrase that the administration itself once used to describe the U.S. role in the 2011 coalition bombing campaign in Libya, but has since become shorthand for being too passive in global crises.

Stewart Patrick, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Friday’s strategy plan fails to make clear how the U.S. should choose between competing priorities of responding to immediate threats while still refusing to fully invest in helping solve world crises. He said the Pentagon, the State Department, and other security and diplomatic government agencies may be unable to build their own respective strategies without clearer advice from the White House.

The blueprint “provides little guidance about the relative importance of the multiple interests it identifies,” Patrick wrote Friday.

In this same issue, Foreign Policy asked over a thousand foreign policy professors to rate the past 50-years of Secretaries of State for effectiveness. John Kerry tied Lawrence Eagleburger (who served for six weeks) at dead last, and Kerry was the Democrat candidate for President who ran against George W Bush. To be a current serving Secretary of State for Obama, a former Democrat presidential candidate, and still end up at the bottom of a list that was put together by probably 95 percent Democrats (university professors in a liberal field) means he must be really, really ineffective.

You can't make this stuff up. Damn I want a t-shirt with that slogan on it.
Or a boat with that name, or possibly a race horse.

I'm shocked - shocked, I tell you! - that @gturner failed to cite the original document, but felt compelled to rely on someone else's interpretation.

Meanwhile, Boehner's managed to piss off Israel:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/06/us-israel-usa-congress-iran-idUSKBN0LA1AG20150206

"Strategic timidity" or "strategic inaction" might be better terms.

Foreign Policy magazine is the premier publication for foreign policy professionals and academics. There is not going to be a document that's more original, except the White House paper that is being mocked.

And Boehner did not piss off Israel. As your article says, one of the Israelis feels Boehner might have misled them into thinking that not every Democrat hates Israel and wants all the Jews to die, which is apparently the case.

Post the actual paper or

Here are a few links:
https://www.google.com/search?outpu...5.3&ei=TaPWVJKGNaiasQSwqIKYDw&emsg=NCSR&noj=1

And here's the actual paper.

The most ridiculous is from the White House itself.

It reads like something from The Onion, saying "Think for a minute where the world would be today without decisive U.S. leadership." Yeah, we've been living that dream for a while now. An Item 3 bullet points hammers it home.

• 
  
  • Leading the international community to prevent and respond to human rights abuses and mass atrocities as well as gender-based violence and discrimination against LGBT persons

Yeah. We should lead the calls for people everywhere to stop watching ISIS videos of gays being thrown off buildings, and we should crack down on trading in the sex-slave futures markets.

You should lead by example.

Threatens a portion of your income, does it?

The official white house statement said..............nothing quantifiable.
Nothing tangible, just vague wishes, hopes and ideas. Just a tap dance of fail
stating things that should be eventually done.

Because the over-active foreign policy under Bush worked out so well, right?

It did indeed. Russia was with us most of the time, and not actively opposed. Libya gave up their nuclear program, Assad pulled out of Lebanon, massive aid flowed to Africa to combat AIDS, Saddam's regime was destroyed, and the Taliban were back on their heals. In almost every way it was better than the current situation, where Yemen is essentially overthrown by rebels, the UAE has given up on the half-hearted efforts against ISIS, the Taliban are resurgent and licking their chops over Obama's scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Iranian nuclear program is moving forward at an ever greater pace, Iraq has been cut in half by ISIS, Syria is burning, Lebanon and Jordan are overflowing with refugees, Libya is in flames and mostly in jihadist hands, the Europeans think we're useless backstabbers, and Russia regards us as an impotent enemy as it gobbles up bits and pieces of its former territory in open defiance of the US.

The ADL says anti-Semitism is the worst since WW-II, even as Obama pressures all the Democrats to boycott the Israeli PM's speech to Congress about the threat from Iran's nuclear program. The UN says the number of refugees is now the worst since WW-II, with four countries at a level 3 refugee crisis, also the worst since WW-II. Not coincidentally, Obama won a poll for the worst President since WW-II. Even in the areas of relative stability, the administration is working to undermine the peace, recently having the State Department receive the leaders of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to give them advice on regaining power. Former top officials in the administration are starting to voice their complaints and frustrations at the utter incompetence, arrogance, and blindness at the heart of it all.

I would have gone with "appeasement" or even "collusion".

Checking calendar.......

Nope, it's still 2015 and Bush still hasn't been in office in 6 years.

So the rise of IS, for example, has nothing to do with Bush's decision to change the regime in Iraq?

In other words, they have no idea what they are doing.

Uh, only wildly indirectly. Bush crushed the oppressive regime that relied on Iraqi Sunnis. They rose up again, and US forces beat them down until Iraqi tribal leaders made peace with us, seeing that the really crazy Sunni radicals were going to consume them. To maintain the peace, we were going to leave a fairly large force in place to keep the crazies from taking over and maintain the peace that had been established. But that made the effort a success, and Obama and people who share his mindset can't stand it when the US actually helps a broken society, which Iraq had been since the 1970's, and allows it time to heal. So Obama insisted on the withdrawal of all US forces, leaving the Shi'ite government unchecked in its proclivity toward corruption and favoritism aimed at payback against the Sunnis.

And there things might have remained, if not for the staggering ineptitude and anti-Americanism of the Obama Administration, who poured fuel onto the fires of the Arab Spring, doing what they could to recognize "authentic" (ie. angry and bloodthirsty) Arab voices, and through both action in support of the radicals and inaction in defense of existing structures, sent the message to all the proto-ISIS wannabees that the neighborhood cop was on their side. Basher Assad didn't fall for getting overthrown by al Qaeda inspired militant Islamists, so the administration turned on John Kerry's frequent dinner companion, who Kerry had constantly praised as a reformer, and the genie was uncorked as Obama tried to use the US Navy and Air Force as the air wing for ISIS and al Qaeda to take out secular, non-theocratic government in the region once and for all. But Obama botched it by passing the decision to Congress, who refused to throw the US behind ISIS and al Qaeda to crush secularism and religious tolerance.

The fight grew larger, drawing too much attention, including attention on the staggering lack of response from the US, so Obama publicly dismissed ISIS as the JV team. Iraq started producing TV programs portraying ISIS as a puppet of Obama. As ISIS rolled toward Baghdad, the White House still kept throwing red tape up to stop Iraq's paid-for-purchase of US F-16's. This was not lost on the Iraqis, who all realized that the Obama Administration would rather see a complete ISIS victory than a Bush success. But the situation with the Yazidis forced Obama to approve very limited airstrikes, not as many as we'd normally flown in Iraq for years, but just enough so he could claim he's doing something, even though it was next to nothing. Everyone in the military is doing what they can to get around the administration, as are all the countries in the region. Until Obama is out of office the war simply cannot be won, and everyone knows it.

How far into a Presidency do you have to go before you stop blaming your predecessor?

Stop. Lying.

Georgia was an actual ally (I flew into Iraq with Georgians) and we did nothing when Russia invaded and took Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Well, nothing except pull our advisors out of the county.

The housing market bubble and financial crises had nothing to do with Clinton's decisions while in office?

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877322,00.html

We vote for presidents to fix problems, not point fingers.

Then we are doing it wrong, IMHO. The role of government is not to fix the world's problems for us. Expecting them to do it, and giving them enough power that they can even try, is one of the greatest sources of even worse problems.

Government should defend the nation from threats within and without (police and national defense), coordinate infrastructure (at the most local level that is capable of dealing with the infrastructure in question), defend the basic rights of everyone, and generally provide an economic setting that is conducive to a society that functions well. But "a society that functions well" has more to do with a society that can handle its own problems than a society that has its problems handled for it.

That's why I do not blame Obama (or Bush) for the rise of ISIS, for example. ISIS is clearly the inevitable result of a number of sociological factors that are not at all the fault of a single person, even if that person is "the leader of the free world" (as misleading as that title is), with the "Arab Spring" being the triggering factor -- when Assad lost control of Syria and no single opposition force was capable of taking his place, the most brutal opposition rose to prominence.

Finger-pointing for those kinds of problems, especially at the president you don't like (Bush, for those who lean to the left politically and Obama, for those who lean to the right), is popular, but it is simplistic, childish, and irrational. The choices in Syria (and in Iraq, for that matter) were all bad: Leave a brutal dictator in place, prop up an opposition that is at best marginally better, or let the situation degenerate into chaos.

In Iraq, Bush made the choice to remove the dictator, but with no reasonable alternative, the result is arguably worse than if nothing had been done (though that is not sure). If he had done nothing, though, it is a safe bet that those who opposed him politically would be blaming him for leaving a brutal dictator in place and "not caring about human rights."

Obama faced the same bad choices in Syria, and made a different choice. The result is arguably as bad as that in Iraq, if not worse. But if he had done anything else, the result would have been, at best, only slightly better, and those who oppose him politically still would have blamed him.

I am growing absolutely sick of the "Rah, rah, rah, my side can make the world better and your side is ruining everything" attitude in American politics, on both sides of the political divide. There is nothing wrong with having preferences, but Obama is not the devil, Bush was not the devil, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are equivalent to the Nazis, and so on. Some are a bit better than others, but none of them can make the world a bright and wonderful place. Promising that "your side" will do so is as stupid as blaming "the other side" for not doing so.

Only if it falls within his basic role. The Constitution got it right, IMO: "...promote the general welfare..." rather than "...provide the general welfare...". The general tenor of the US Constitution is to describe a government that makes a reasonably functioning society possible, without trying to make everyone's life good for them. We have gotten very, very far from that. The right wants to make everyone's life better by requiring them to follow "correct" moral values (meaning, the values of those who make the laws) and the left wants to make everyone's life better by making sure everyone has a certain level of economic prosperity, and that involves way more interference in people's lives than I think worthwhile.

And that is despite being in favor, personally, of both of those goals. I just don't think it is government's place to provide them for me. It is government's place to make sure that no one is unfairly depriving me of the possibility of either one (accent on the word "unfairly"), and that is all. Whether or not I take advantage of that to make something of myself, or destroy my life, is my business, not government's.

As for "working to make sure the crisis never happens in the first place," and using the particular example of ISIS, I defy you or anyone else to define a strategy that could have prevented it, and could be known to have prevented it. There were no good choices in Syria (or in Iraq, for that matter). The very best we could wish for is for a president who made the least bad choice, but since all choices are bad, any course of action (or inaction) is easily criticized. Those who do so, however, sound like the candidate Obama who pretty much gave the impression that such problems could be avoided if only we would try being nice and talking to people. You will notice that six years and change later, he is no longer talking the same way.

It's high time for a lot of people to figure out that same lesson.

You could say that there were no good choices in Syria.
But the situation has changed.

The United States has an opportunity here.
You won't often find a villain like ISIS.
Jordan has vowed to destroy ISIS, but they shouldn't have to do it alone.

The United States should be actively building a coalition of interested parties to take down ISIS.
Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey would all benefit from the destruction of ISIS.
The existence of a rebel state in the center of the Middle East, threatens the security of every country in the region.

These countries may have differing agendas, but each one could benefit from a good relationship with the United States.

A regional coalition, that included the United States, could build a new Syria;
that would be a model for the transformation of the Middle East.

A nice sentiment, and one I would love to agree with. But I can't.

I'm not saying we should not do something about ISIS. We should and, to a limited extent at least, we are.

But the idea that "a regional coalition, that included the United States, could build a new Syria; that would be a model for the transformation of the Middle East", is mere wishful thinking, IMO. I find it highly probable that, 20 years from now or so, that "model Syria" will not be as much of a model as hoped for, and everyone will be pointing fingers at the US for helping put in place what turned out to be one more oppressive regime.

Yes, I think we should demolish ISIS, as well as all their allies (Boko Haram in Nigeria, for example). But I still do not see that as a good choice. And I think that whoever does it (Obama, or his successor) will be vilified by "the other side" of the political spectrum for it, not too far in the future.

The problem in Syria is when we attack ISIS Assad profits while the moderate rebels are now just a tiny rump who can't do much of anything. So defacto we are aiding Assad.

I think I've heard that one before, about Iraq though.

I'm pretty sure if this type of long-term planning had been floated by someone else it would have gotten a different reaction.

You want to change the topic entirely in order to defend your partisan boy? That's very touching. I wouldn't even disagree that decisions made during the Clinton years (by himself and the GOP majority) led to financial crisis, but we're talking about foreign policy.

History does matter. And the critiques against Obama's cautious stance seem to forget that the last fifteen years happened. Hawkishness in Iraq cost us dearly, and is still costing us. We can't afford another protracted intervention.

I've criticized bush often. You're also a pot calling the kettle black when it comes to defending Obama. Some of us are just getting a little tired of hearing the same spin for the last six years.

Yes but then you brought up Bush which led me to point out what I did. You changed the subject first, not me.