The Congressional climate during Barack Obama’s tenure as our 44th president has been an object-lesson in polarized politics, with Republicans rewriting the textbook on blockading government as an opposition party. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) immediately raised the banner calling for a one-term presidency as “the single most important thing we want to achieve”.
Ever since, Americans have painfully endured Washington’s shocking and unnecessary paralysis – an unprecedented act of self-induced impotency. Polls reveal an all-time low 9% approval rating for Congress as Americans grow tired of watching the slow-motion unraveling of a once functional democracy. A wanton arroyo of blow-hard punditry adorns various cable news channels, offering Americans an expansive smorgasbord of opinions often masquerading as journalism. The internet multiplies this trend exponentially.
Once fed a steady diet of Walter Kronkite’s pre-digested news in a centrist, middle-of-the-road format, Americans are now left to fend for their own judgmental devices. The Congressional blockade, coupled with media spinsters vacuously shredding Obama’s foreign policy endeavors, only serves to reveal the GOP’s absence of a discernible diplomatic platform of any sort.
In the fallout of the Bush presidency, any perceived, theoretical monopoly over national security issues once held by the Republican Party no longer bears merit. The ill-advised strategy to demolish and occupy Iraq cost more than four thousand American soldiers their lives, as well as $4 trillion borrowed against future taxation.
Contrast this decision against our role in eliminating Gaddafi, and there’s hardly a comparison. While naysayers dismiss U.S. involvement in Libya as “leading from behind”, the bottom line speaks for itself: zero American casualties with a price tag of $100 billion (which the Libyan National Council agreed to reimburse).
Avoiding a protracted occupation and an unending financial commitment to nation-building, Obama instead tasked NATO forces to conduct a targeted bombing campaign allowing a loose alignment of pick-up truck riding revolutionaries to commandeer their country from the clutches of a ruthless megalomaniac. This grassroots aspect of popular democracy gives Libya a chance at successfully rebuilding their nation on par with Iraq.
Militarism at the behest of a humanitarian agenda while advancing national security interests minus the plunder of the U.S. treasury blends neoliberal foreign policy with principled fiscal conservatism – the backbone of “neocon” Republicanism. That there wasn’t a single American casualty: priceless.
The Obama administration was able to deftly navigate the uncharted mosaic of Middle Eastern diplomacy, securing an unprecedented seal of approval from the Arab League prior to engagement. The ghost of Ronald Reagan would approve with both thumbs.
Obama garnered permission from the United Nations, another principle dejected by the Bush administration. How conducting foreign policy against the collective blessing of the international community became a Republican talking point remains beyond comprehension for many voters. The implications of acting unilaterally in the modern age of multinational corporate interconnectedness should provoke any politician relying heavily on the contributions of “big business” to avoid any rhetorical disdain for the global collective in recognition of its inherent self-defeatism of our long-term economic well-being as a nation.
Instead, Rick Perry promises to defund the UN, winning him a round of thundering applause. The Republican presidential primary debates have been all over the map with regards to foreign relations, offering candidates who stand for reclusive isolationism to those hinting at the imperial domination of China.
Mitt Romney labeled Obama’s decision to leave Iraq by year’s end a “failure... by virtue of ineptitude” – not mentioning how he would have funded a prolonged occupation, or that the current Status of Forces Agreement had been stipulated by the outgoing Bush administration.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich insists a pull-out “will be seen by historians as a decisive defeat for the United States in Iraq.”
Pennsylvania’s former Senator Rick Santorum said it “shows the weakness of this diplomatic effort, the weakness of this President in being able to shape the battlefield.”
Ron Paul adamantly believes the military should be recalled for Homeland Security duty; period, end-of-story. Herman Cain just learned that China has “indicated an interest in developing nuclear capabilities” fifty years after the fact, while Michelle Bachmann avoids any intelligible discussion about Republican diplomacy whatsoever.
Meanwhile, dozens of high-value terrorists targeted by the Bush administration have been captured or killed on Obama’s watch, including al Qaeda’s internet guru, Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as the architect of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden. The use of drones has increased dramatically under Obama’s direction, eliminating Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan.
Barack Obama's foreign policy doesn’t mark the abandonment of “American Exceptionalism”, but instead, the embodiment of its reaffirmation. This conduct quells the perception of America as merely a declining empire motivated by militant pursuits of third-world resource extraction.
Voters habitually predisposed to pulling either Party's lever will not be deciding the presidential race in 2012. Rather, it will depend upon the same “independent middle” instrumental in ascending Obama to the presidency in 2008 – especially in battleground states, a list which includes Pennsylvania. To this electorate, it grows increasingly obvious what the left-wing of Obama’s political base readily admits: this president is the finest Republican the Democrats ever produced.
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