A Lack of Strategic Reassurance
One of the main reasons a nation can become a "superpower", "hyperpower", "global hegemon", or whatever term you want to call a singularly important nation that is more powerful than others by several orders of magnitude, is that it offers strategic reassurance to other nations.
The history of international relations is a history of balances of power and ever shifting alliances that recalibrate those forces. A superpower is capable of attaining and retaining such status by being less scary to other nations than potential competitors are. This allows that nation to to always be closer to both friend and foe than they are with each other. This is Bismarckian (and Kissingerian) thinking. Even when it fails for a time, it is returned to in order to once more find an equilibrium (as after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars or after the cataclysms of World Wars I and II).
This was a key ingredient to the U.S. long term strategy of containment that dominated much of the Cold War era.
This article by Frederick Kagan and Dan Blumenthal illustrates exceptionally well (and efficiently) how President Obama is squandering this. This should be read along with the Krauthammer pieces I have posted before to show just how problematic Obama's approach really is for world affairs.
The irony of Obama is that rather than being a "great change" or someone who bucks conventional wisdom, he is actually the embodiement of western, enlightened, quasi post-modern thought as exemplified in much of Europe. Obama is "conventional" and the conventions of the present era are conventions of naivity and fear. Naivity due to believing man can be fundamentally changed, fear that the blood stains of past conflicts can only be absolved by avoiding their prospects in the future.
Unortunately, this conventional wisdom will only hold until the system breaks down. Though that may not happen, to be unprepared for such a truly radical contingency is a mark of a lack of creativity.
We need to keep "reassuring" and maintain our relative power, not attempt to dissolve into an amorphous mass of humanity, because that will not work over the long term.
The history of international relations is a history of balances of power and ever shifting alliances that recalibrate those forces. A superpower is capable of attaining and retaining such status by being less scary to other nations than potential competitors are. This allows that nation to to always be closer to both friend and foe than they are with each other. This is Bismarckian (and Kissingerian) thinking. Even when it fails for a time, it is returned to in order to once more find an equilibrium (as after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars or after the cataclysms of World Wars I and II).
This was a key ingredient to the U.S. long term strategy of containment that dominated much of the Cold War era.
This article by Frederick Kagan and Dan Blumenthal illustrates exceptionally well (and efficiently) how President Obama is squandering this. This should be read along with the Krauthammer pieces I have posted before to show just how problematic Obama's approach really is for world affairs.
The irony of Obama is that rather than being a "great change" or someone who bucks conventional wisdom, he is actually the embodiement of western, enlightened, quasi post-modern thought as exemplified in much of Europe. Obama is "conventional" and the conventions of the present era are conventions of naivity and fear. Naivity due to believing man can be fundamentally changed, fear that the blood stains of past conflicts can only be absolved by avoiding their prospects in the future.
Unortunately, this conventional wisdom will only hold until the system breaks down. Though that may not happen, to be unprepared for such a truly radical contingency is a mark of a lack of creativity.
We need to keep "reassuring" and maintain our relative power, not attempt to dissolve into an amorphous mass of humanity, because that will not work over the long term.
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