With the murder of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya maybe the discussion of foreign policy will make it back into the presidential race. Here are clips from three good articles on the topic:
Five Questions with John Bolton, the former U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations
Bolton: It is central to successful U.S. foreign policy that we achieve the overwhelming preponderance of our key objectives diplomatically, without the use of force. But as the Romans said, si vis pacem, para bellum: If you want peace, prepare for war. George Washington used the maxim in his first State of the Union address, and in our day, Ronald Reagan characterized his policy as “peace through strength.” The point is clear.
Unfortunately, too many mistake resolve for belligerence. President Obama, for example, acts as if American strength is provocative, that we are too much in the world, and that a lesser U.S. profile would make other nations better disposed toward us. This is exactly backwards. It is not our strength that is provocative, but our weakness, which simply emboldens our adversaries to take advantage of what they see as decline and retreat.
Who’s Better Off?
Our nation’s enemies are grateful to the Obama administration.
In his debate with Jimmy Carter on October 28, 1980, Ronald Reagan looked at the television cameras and said, “Ask yourself, ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?'” It’s always a good political question, but it’s too often not asked outside the context of our domestic issues.
The question is equally important if it’s focused outward: who among our enemies and allies are better off now than they were on the day President Obama was inaugurated? The answers are a cacophony of bad news, as bad as the answer to the current domestic version of the question.
The World’s Not Better Off
[A] net assessment would clearly show that, on Mr. Obama’s watch, the world has become much more hospitable to its ideology and goals, and much less safe for America and our interests.
That is the case in no small measure because of the help Team Obama has given to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that fully shares al Qaeda’s ambitions to impose its totalitarian, supremacist Islamic doctrine known as shariah on the rest of the world under the rule of a Caliph. As the Center for Security Policy has documented in a free online video-based curriculum entitled The Muslim Brotherhood in America: the Enemy Within, that help has taken myriad forms including: recognizing and engaging the Brotherhood in Egypt; helping it come to power there; and providing $1.5 billion in aid after the Brotherhood’s political party dominated Egyptian parliamentary elections and on the eve of the election of its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, to the presidency.
