hypocritexposer
Well-known member
I've also linked to a good story in Newsweek about the lack of a 'Grand Strategy" or strategic thinking with this administration.
Wanted: A Grand Strategy for America
NEWSWEEK’s new columnist on Obama’s Egypt debacle and the vacuum it exposes.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/wanted-a-grand-strategy-for-america.html
President Obama got a shellacking on Monday from a Harvard history professor who said his inexperience showed in the White House’s handling of Egypt’s crisis.
On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Niall Ferguson said the Obama administration lacked a strategy for Egypt and failed to have a contingency plan in place if a transition of power from Hosni Mubarak to his son didn’t go as planned.
“This completely took the administration by surprise. They admitted that they had not planned for this scenario,” said Ferguson, an adviser for Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid who wrote a cover story in Newsweek this week called “Obama's Egypt and Foreign Policy Failures.”
He said Obama believed that giving a speech in Cairo in 2009 was a sufficient articulation of vision for democratization in the region. But he said, “Since then, nobody seems to have considered for five minutes that Mr. Mubarak would be overthrown.”
“This was a scenario that was being considered in Israel last year, and I think a question has to be asked about why it wasn’t being considered by the National Security Council,” he said. “I mean, what are these people being paid to do?”
Summing up Obama’s “strategic concept,” Ferguson said it boils down to: “I’m not George W. Bush; love me.”
http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/0211/harvard_review_15f18158-d9ff-4470-b81c-1b9c496e7697.html
Wanted: A Grand Strategy for America
NEWSWEEK’s new columnist on Obama’s Egypt debacle and the vacuum it exposes.
The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak’s cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever ultimately wins, Obama loses. And the alienation doesn’t end there. America’s two closest friends in the region—Israel and Saudi Arabia—are both disgusted. The Saudis, who dread all manifestations of revolution, are appalled at Washington’s failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak. The Israelis, meanwhile, are dismayed by the administration’s apparent cluelessness.
The contrast between the foreign policy of the Nixon-Ford years and that of President Jimmy Carter is a stark reminder of how easily foreign policy can founder when there is a failure of strategic thinking. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, which took the Carter administration wholly by surprise, was a catastrophe far greater than the loss of South Vietnam.
Remind you of anything? “This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” an anonymous American official told The New York Times last week. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.”
I can think of no more damning indictment of the administration’s strategic thinking than this: it never once considered a scenario in which Mubarak faced a popular revolt. Yet the very essence of rigorous strategic thinking is to devise such a scenario and to think through the best responses to them, preferably two or three moves ahead of actual or potential adversaries. It is only by doing these things—ranking priorities and gaming scenarios—that a coherent foreign policy can be made. The Israelis have been hard at work doing this. All the president and his NSC team seem to have done is to draft touchy-feely speeches like the one he delivered in Cairo early in his presidency.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/wanted-a-grand-strategy-for-america.html