John Bolton On Obama's Foreign Policy: 'The Innocents Abroad '

Perhaps America's most effective UN Ambassador and nuclear proliferation expert John Bolton has a sobering and entirely accurate reading of President Obama's foreign policy...or rather, his non-policy. Bolton shows that the current occupant of the White House is essentially uninterested in foreign policy and national security, something I first theorized on these pages some time ago.

Here's a slice:

Barack Obama's badly flawed worldview and the incoherent foreign policy flowing from it have now disintegrated. Within the past few months, his media acolytes notwithstanding, the evidence has become conclusive: Obama's presidency is gravely wounding America and its friends. His response to virtually every significant threat or crisis has either complicated or worsened the problem, or, at best, left it essentially no closer to resolution.

Obama has repeatedly highlighted his propensity to apologize for America's past transgressions (as he defines them), and his disinclination to be assertive on our behalf. Indeed, so radically different is Obama from any prior American president that many observers have concluded that he has a comprehensive plan, and that somewhere in all that mess there must be a doctrine. Others look not for a plan, but for a plot; pop psychology and conspiracy theories abound as to why Obama is so comfortable, even enthusiastic, about American decline.

But it is folly to look for rhyme and reason when there is neither. For better or worse, there is no single dispositive flaw in Obama's doctrine, since there is little that resembles a doctrine. His saunter through world affairs is unstructured. Instead, the explanation for his policy's failure, and its well-deserved collapse now unfolding before us, lies in a jumbled mix of philosophy, political priorities, and personal inadequacy. Like Obama's presidency generally, his national-security flaws combine ideology, naïveté, weakness, lack of leadership, intellectual laziness, and a near-religious faith in negotiation for its own sake.

Perhaps most significantly, Obama is simply not interested in foreign and defense policy. To state such a proposition about a U.S. president seems counterintuitive or even shocking, but Obama is different from all of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat, since Franklin Roosevelt. His first thought on awakening each morning is not about threats to America, its global interests, and its friends and allies, but about his efforts to radically restructure our economy and society. That is where his intellect and his heart are focused, and his lack of attention to the rest of the world is palpable. When Obama has no other choice but to concentrate on international affairs--such as during the Afghanistan surge or the killing of Osama bin Laden--he will do so, but only for as long as is necessary to address the immediate problem before him.

In those few national-security areas where Obama does his homework, a second characteristic predominates: He simply does not see much occurring internationally that threatens American interests. Such a benign view of a chaotic world may be even more shocking than his general lack of interest, but it is yet another reflection of his underlying intellectual laziness. He is most politely described as credulous and inexperienced, especially for someone who lived overseas as a child. During both the 2008 campaign and his presidency, for example, Obama has downplayed the very concept of a "global war on terror," treated nuclear proliferation as a side issue, and ignored the enormous strategic threats posed by a rising China and a belligerent Russia. American decline, most recently reflected in S&P's downgrade of America's sovereign debt to France's level, is untroubling and even natural to him.

In days gone by, Americans with such attitudes were classified as isolationists. But the president is no advocate of insularity, instead choosing multilateralism and expressing it in rhetoric that could have come straight from its source, Woodrow Wilson. It was Wilson, after all, and not our first community-organizer president, who insisted that "there must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power, not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." Here is the ideology of negotiation and global governance in its fullest flower.

Radical as Obama is, his worldview is not dissimilar from those of a long line of liberal presidential candidates, stretching back decades. In 1988, for example, Vice President George H. W. Bush said of his November opponent, Michael Dukakis: "He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe." Precisely the same could be said about Obama. The only significant difference is that Obama made it to the White House, and Dukakis didn't. This is why, two years ago in Standpoint magazine, I called Obama our first "post-American President," one unburdened by American exceptionalism.

So what emerges from a president who is basically uninterested in foreign affairs, who doesn't see our manifold threats and challenges as worthy of presidential time and energy, who repeatedly stresses devotion to negotiations that are divorced from their substantive outcome, and who believes that multilateral fora rather than American resolve and power can address foreign problems? The now-indisputable answer is a failing, collapsing U.S. foreign policy.

Bolton goes on to detail exactly how the president's non-policy is leading us into dangerous waters with Iran, North Korea and Islamist terrorism, not to mention Russia and China.

A sobering, valuable and detailed piece. Read the rest here.

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