The Cost of Disowning Jimmy Carter

[Lodestar]

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What Democrats Lose When They Run From Carter's Foreign Policy Legacy

(excerpt)

AL­THOUGH BARACK OBAMA won’t ad­mit it, his for­eign policy in­stincts and Jimmy Carter’s have much in com­mon. Like Carter, Obama took of­fice in the wake of a dis­astrous war. And like Carter, he has re­spon­ded by at­tempt­ing to dis­card the doc­trine that un­der­lay it. For Carter, the war was Vi­et­nam and the doc­trine was glob­al con­tain­ment. For Obama, it is Ir­aq and the “war on ter­ror,” a term coined un­der George W. Bush that Obama poin­tedly ditched. Like Carter, Obama ar­gued that this doc­trine of per­man­ent war burdened Amer­ica’s eco­nomy and jus­ti­fied the vi­ol­a­tion of civil liber­ties at home and hu­man rights abroad. Like Carter, he be­lieves it dam­aged Amer­ica’s world­wide repu­ta­tion. And like Carter, he be­lieves it spawned a heavy-handed in­ter­ven­tion­ism that pro­voked na­tion­al­ist back­lashes over­seas.

But per­haps most im­port­ant, Obama, like Carter, be­lieves he in­her­ited a doc­trine shaped by ex­cess­ive fear. Where Carter told stu­dents at Notre Dame that Amer­ic­an for­eign policy should not be mo­tiv­ated by an “in­or­din­ate fear” of com­mun­ism, Obama in May 2013 told an audi­ence at the Na­tion­al De­fense Uni­versity that “we have to make de­cisions based not on fear but on hard-earned wis­dom.” That wis­dom, Obama ar­gued, re­quired re­cog­niz­ing that al­though al-Qaida’s spin-offs could still launch at­tacks, “these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.” As a res­ult, al­though Amer­ica should make “per­sist­ent, tar­geted ef­forts to dis­mantle spe­cif­ic net­works of vi­ol­ent ex­trem­ists,” it need no longer fight a “bound­less ‘war on ter­ror.’ “

As in the late 1970s, the de­bate between Obama and his hawk­ish crit­ics is in part a de­bate between a pres­id­ent who be­lieves that the world is trend­ing Amer­ica’s way—and thus that the United States should not over­re­act to prob­lems by do­ing “stu­pid shit”—and crit­ics who be­lieve that Amer­ica’s foes are gain­ing the up­per hand. In a speech in 2011, Mitt Rom­ney blas­ted the “wish­ful think­ing that the world is be­com­ing a safer place. The op­pos­ite is true.” Obama, by con­trast, last Au­gust told a fun­draiser that “things are much less dan­ger­ous now than they were 20 years ago, 25 years ago, or 30 years ago.”
This de­bate between calm and fear, or op­tim­ism and pess­im­ism, plays it­self out across a range of sub­jects. One of them is Rus­sia. Many Re­pub­lic­ans have claimed that Vladi­mir Putin is, in the words of former Re­pub­lic­an House In­tel­li­gence Chair­man Mike Ro­gers, “run­ning circles around the U.S.,” and ush­er­ing in a fright­en­ing new era in which dic­tat­ors in­vade their neigh­bors with im­pun­ity. (Which is pretty much what hawks said when the So­vi­ets in­vaded Afgh­anistan.) Obama, by con­trast, has ar­gued that Putin is not strong but weak. “Rus­sia looks pretty ag­gress­ive right now,” he said at the fun­draiser last Au­gust, “but Rus­sia’s eco­nomy is go­ing nowhere.” Like Carter, who be­lieved that eco­nom­ic stag­na­tion would cur­tail So­viet ex­pan­sion­ism, Obama has ar­gued that fin­an­cial mar­kets—primed by West­ern sanc­tions—are pun­ish­ing Putin for his ac­tions in Ukraine. And that far from ush­er­ing in a new era of Rus­si­an strength, Putin’s be­ha­vi­or simply ex­poses his coun­try’s un­der­ly­ing weak­ness.

A par­al­lel de­bate has oc­curred on the sub­ject of Ar­ab demo­cracy. After their Bush-era flir­ta­tion with op­tim­ism about demo­cracy’s pro­spects in the Mideast, most Obama-era hawks have re­turned to 1970s-style pess­im­ism. Echo­ing Kirk­patrick’s de­fense of Nicaragua’s So­moza and the Shah of Ir­an, many con­ser­vat­ive politi­cians and pun­dits have praised Egypt’s mil­it­ary ruler, Ab­del Fat­tah el-Sisi, as prefer­able to his demo­crat­ic­ally elec­ted Muslim Broth­er­hood pre­de­cessor, Mo­hamed Mor­si. Last June on Charlie Rose, for in­stance, Dick Cheney said he’d “help Sisi every chance I get.”

Obama, by con­trast, like Carter, has been more sup­port­ive than his crit­ics of pop­u­lar protests against Amer­ic­an-backed dic­tat­ors. (Which is far from say­ing that he has ditched every tyr­an­nic­al U.S. ally. His will­ing­ness to pri­or­it­ize demo­cracy is, like Carter’s, re­l­at­ive.) In 2011, with Egyp­tians massed in Tahrir Square, Obama over­ruled Hil­lary Clin­ton, Joe Biden, and De­fense Sec­ret­ary Robert Gates and called for Hosni Mubarak to leave of­fice im­me­di­ately. Which led Rush Limbaugh, after a lengthy mono­logue about Carter and Re­agan, to quip, “Obama seems de­term­ined to give us Ir­an on the Nile.”

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http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/2015/01/30/Cost-Disowning-Jimmy-Carter?mref=scroll

[Demeter]

1. President Carter was destroyed by his own party--and the Southerners at that!

It was shameful. And the MSM was more than willing to play along, thanks to GOP buying it up.

Well, it's time for some monopolies to be broken up, some wrongs to be righted, and the Civil War to finally be put to rest.