President Obama’s Foreign Policy

March 12, 2016

On Friday, March 11, I read a “can’t put it down” 20,000-word article by Jeffrey Goldberg for The Atlantic: The Obama Doctrine. Mr. Goldberg, a fine writer who focuses on the Middle East, got four substantial interviews with the president in the past few months, on top of many prior conversations.

The piece is a tour de force. And anyone who reads it within the context of the foreign policy debates in the 2016 presidential campaigns—or, for that matter, taking into consideration how the candidates focus on domestic issues—will rue February 27, 1951, the day on which the Minnesota State Legislature ratified the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, barring the election of a president for a

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President Barack Obama: Not a Blowhard

January 3, 2015

I heard—and then I read—the Steve Inskeep National Public Radio interview with President Barack Obama a few days ago. Here’s the sound and the transcript, and it’s worth your time.

The portion of the interview that caught my particular attention is here, offered with slight editing—and highlighting—for reading ease:

Is there a responsibility by the United States to do more in Libya, having been involved in overthrowing the Gadhafi regime?

I think that the challenge that we’re going to have is a recognition that we are hugely influential; we’re the one indispensable nation. But when it comes to nation-building, when it comes to what is going to be a generational project in a place like Libya or a place

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