The article, which really should have been titled “Take my foreign policy advice! Please!” starts with this overview:
The Middle East initiatives heralded in his 2009 Cairo speech fizzled or never got started at all, and the Middle East today is more volatile than ever. The administration’s response to the escalating violence in Syria has consisted mostly of anxious thumb-twiddling. The Israelis and the Palestinians are both furious at us. In Afghanistan, Obama lost faith in his own strategy: he never fought to fully resource it, and now we’re searching for a way to leave without condemning the Afghans to endless civil war. In Pakistan, years of throwing money in the military’s direction have bought little cooperation and less love.
The Russians want to reset the reset, neither the Chinese nor anyone else can figure out what, if anything, the “pivot to Asia” really means, and Latin America and Africa continue to be mostly ignored, along with global issues such as climate change. Meanwhile, the administration’s expanding drone campaign suggests a counterterrorism strategy that has completely lost its bearings—we no longer seem very clear on who we need to kill or why.
What should Obama do? Well, he should “get a strategy,” which, according to Brooks, will guarantee success, because strategies always work. Also, he should “get some decent managers,” which, to my mind, translates as “not those damn dickheads who ran me out of my job,” a gloss that I would also apply to Rosa’s third admonition, “get some people who actually know something.”
I guess Rosa must know something—you can’t get a job like the one she had without knowing something—but in this article she manages to hide whatever knowledge or expertise she possesses. Maybe Obama’s problem—part of it, at least—is that he hired too many people like Rosa.
