I didn’t get a lot out of this Wall Street Journal editorial but I was struck by one passage:
Second term Presidents typically reap what they’ve sown on foreign policy, and Mrs. Clinton can’t repeat the Obama 2012 mantra that “the tide of war is receding.†The chaos in the Middle East and Africa is to some extent beyond their control, as are the world’s rogues. Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei can read the U.S. political calendar and may become more aggressive to lock in more strategic gains while Mr. Obama is in office.
in which the editors apparently didn’t get their own joke. At least as perceived by much of the world we are the “world’s rogues”. Whether we should be is a reasonable topic of discussion but you can’t begin such a discussion unless you recognize that’s the way we’ve been behaving since the collapse of the Soviet Union at least.
I’m struck by the WSJ’s apparent belief that the United States has a great deal of control over what happens. I think we have very little, short of throwing a superpower tantrum and blowing everything to hell. They’re re-heating an old sectarian war – a war that started eight centuries before Columbus sailed the ocean blue and has festered, on and off, ever since.
Our control is minimal; there are many other actors with their own agendas. However, we have a great capacity for mischief: Sudan, Somalia, Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraina, Libya, Egypt, Syria … None has gone well or as intended (?). We (the US) are a rogue terrorist state.