To say that the administration has dropped the ball on foreign policy would be a gross understatement.
The full list of disasters resulting from neglect and inaction is too long to recount, but we can highlight the most damning: Israel and the Palestinians are further from peace than ever. Egypt’s once-promising move toward democracy has stalled as the Muslim Brotherhood government has become more authoritarian. Narcotics continue to flow north into American cities while a drug war bleeds our southern neighbor. And of course, the Europeans still have not gotten their economic house in order.
It keeps going: the failure to end the violence in Syria, the spillover into neighboring countries, the failure of efforts to “get tough” with China, the escalating violence between Pakistan and India.
The author’s point, of course, is that this op-ed could easily describe the next four years under either presidential candidate. I like this article because I detest partisanship, and believe that the majority of the problems facing our country are structural and have little to do with one party or the other–and they certainly have little to do with the strengths and weaknesses of specific individuals. When it comes to foreign policy, presidents belonging to both parties are routinely condemned for failing to solve unsolvable problems. If we could just admit that progress on these foreign policy challenges will be incremental and extremely difficult (at best), we would go a long way toward defusing the rage and hostility on which domestic politics feeds.
