Can Obama Win as a War President? [View All]

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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/can-obama-win-as-a-war-president/247182/

The Republicans aiming for the White House might be well-advised to pack it in on foreign policy for a while and cede the field to President Obama. While they've got a case to make against his economic stewardship, their national security critiques are increasingly at odds with the facts on the ground.

The narrative from Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and other candidates is that Obama is a weakling who continually apologizes for America, doesn't believe we're exceptional, cedes leadership to other nations, mistreats Israel, and is overseeing our march toward lesser-power status. The problem with those narratives is that they are, for the most part, false -- and obviously so.

Obama has brought his party close to parity with the Republican Party when it comes to which one voters trust more to keep the nation safe. In a world ever more complicated, dangerous and economically fragile, he can make a strong argument that he deserves re-election based his record as commander in chief. That may not be enough to offset the pain of the recession and voters' desire for change, but Republicans are bolstering his case in at least two ways: One, some are making unforced errors on foreign policy and two, as they court conservative primary voters, the GOP candidates may be misreading the type of foreign policy most Americans want.

The operating assumption among most of them is that the public yearns for the good old bellicose days when George W. Bush divided the world into with us or against us, talked about the axis of evil, invaded two countries, and decided we would stick around indefinitely to rebuild them as modern democracies. Yet Obama's election was a rejection of that approach. The public had turned against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and remains against them. People have even been wary of Obama's limited deployment of U.S. military and diplomatic muscle in Libya, though it was in concert with NATO and Libyan rebel forces and there were no U.S. troops on the ground there.