‘At the moment, mainstream media criticism of the President’s foreign policy mostly centers around the issues that bother the legalist left: too many drones, not enough closure at Guantanamo, too much persecution of reporters trying to ferret the President’s dark secrets out of his staff. What isn’t taking place, yet, is a process of examining the consequences of key administration moves in the Middle East.’
Joshua Landis’ blog here.
Al Jazeera live blog on Syria here.
Interesting paper here.
Addition: What’s going on in Turkey? More here. The region is roiling.
Adam Garfinkle makes it sound almost mercurial:
So why is the United States not intervening in Syria? Because our level of affinity with the victims is low, our aesthetic sense is not much ruffled, and our cycle-sensitivity is very high. We actually do have interests and principles both at stake in Syria, but they’re no match for the real reasons why America does or does not intervene abroad
From a while back: Full video here. (Zbigniew Brzezinski, David Ignatius, Jim Jones and Michael Mazarr respond to Mazarr’s new article “The Risk Of Ignoring Strategic Insolvency“) More discussion of the piece here.
Many Americans are contented enough at the moment with a move away back towards isolationism, away from Iraq and Afpak, and to regroup and align our interests with our budget (our military budget is being cut significantly, presumably to spend it inefficiently at home).
Now, we’re never going to fix that part of the world, but we want to be strategically well placed within it. The Republican establishment isn’t looking too good on foreign policy, and the neo-con wave crested a while ago. Personally, I have little faith that the current ideals guiding foreign policy, and the political commitments that come with them, can place us as well as we need to be placed.
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