Walter Russell Mead At The American Interest ‘The Prime Minister’s Speech:’

The whole of Obama’s foreign policy comes under scrutiny, including backsliding away from the tougher line on Iran at the beginning of the p5 + 1 negotiations, into what is now only a ten-year time-line.

Mead:

‘So the Moderate Islamist strategy, essentially the only strategy that is un-horrible enough for liberal strategists to contemplate without self-loathing, is, while not totally useless, incapable of stabilizing the region or of making the terror madness go away—or even of keeping the threat within some kind of marginally acceptable bounds.

Even so, the proponents of this strategy can’t bear to let it go. The alternatives are so ugly and dispiriting, and so deeply unwelcome to the Democratic base, that the Obama wing of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment can’t bear to think about them, much less conduct American foreign policy on different and more realistic lines. (Camp Clinton, by the way, seems somewhat less inhibited.) As a result, the deeper the Obama administration’s Islamist strategy runs into the mud, the more bitter its proponents become about what they increasingly see as the Israeli millstone around the neck of American foreign policy. This is when high minded liberals and progressives find themselves tempted to echo the arguments of the anti-Israel paleocons, and when fantasies of an all-powerful, unpatriotic Israel Lobby begin to loom in their minds.’

Oh, there’s always someone to blame.

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Notice Dan Drezner doesn’t focus on Obama’s overall policy achievements, but rather on the little that Netanyahu’s speech may have achieved relative to its stated aims; his inability to sway the people actually making Obama, and Americas,’  foreign policy .

Which is true, as far as it goes:

‘Meanwhile, the GOP leadership in Congress, when they’re not busy disagreeing with each other over strategy, can take solace that they one-upped Obama in the war of foreign policy trolling.

And since the American public still supports cutting a deal with Iran, the Obama administration can be confident that their message of “let’s continue to make a good faith effort on negotiations” will be well-received at home.’

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As for me, I’d still like more realism, and think that there perhaps was a window for dealing with the mullahs in Iran, but that such a window has likely passed as the deal appears to get worse as the expectations get lower.

I don’t find much in common with Obama’s team and his pro-peace, activist base, and find little to recommend them from the consequences of his Middle-East policies in action so far.  I think he’s got many wrong ideas and remain skeptical about how our leverage is being used in negotiating with such dangerous people.

Witnessing party Democrat reactions to the speech is sad enough, as is the grumbling and confusion over at the GOP and my general distaste for the political class at the moment.  Such seems to be life in D.C., a two-party town, when it comes to dealing with Iran.

These are the people we’ve got.

***Addition-I’m assured by an emailer that the people in Iran who don’t favor the mullahs and may not favor deliverable nukes (for the glory of Persepolis, by Jove), are very ‘moderate’ indeed.  Just like all those moderates in the Muslim Brotherhood, the moderates in Syria and Iraq, Egypt, Palestine and even Libya, they are about to burst into pure democratic social justice awareness and peaceful democratic self-governance.

Short of that, the global trans-national peace raft and coalition of concerned institutions has TOTALLY got ISIS, the mullahs, the Wahhabis, the Israelis, al Shabaab, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, the House of Saud, Hamas, Hizbollah, the King of Jordan etc…under control.

This is what global progress looks like, and if you disagree, you’re pretty clearly a warmonger.

Thanks emailer!

Another addition:  As posted, what worldview could help account for our current foreign policy?:

Well, this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius:

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