Fareed “Everyone else has said this so I have to say it too” Zakaria writes a column accusing President Obama of running a foreign policy that has failed, over and over again, to be, well, fabulous! Remember Ronald Reagan? He gave speeches that had some swagger, some class! “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Why can’t Obama say cool shit like that?
Well, for one thing, that was then and this is now, but Fareed, for all his expertise, can’t seem to grok the fact that circumstances determine men far more than men determine circumstances. He wants excitement, damn it, and he wants it now! Naturally, Fareed doesn’t want the U.S. to, you know, invade Russia, yet “it is vital that Obama rally the world against Russia’s violation of [Ukraine’s] borders.”
Excuse me, but if you live in China, or India, or Brazil, or a hundred other countries, why does it matter to you if a tiny little nub of land belongs to Russia or Ukraine? You simply don’t give a damn, and you won’t be rallied. Furthermore, as Anne Applebaum pointed out in a New Republic article, “Ukraine” is scarcely a viable country. Most of the people who live in East Ukraine were moved there by Soviet bureaucrats. They speak Russian and aren’t terribly excited about being ruled by people who don’t. They surely would be happy to live in whatever country provides them with prosperity and a stable social order. Beyond that, everything else is negotiable. There is nothing “sacred” about the current boundaries of Eastern Europe.
The kicker is that Fareed knows all of this. Nine-tenths of his article is written in praise of Obama’s foreign policy, which reflects about 95% of his own priorities. He knows that Putin does not “threaten” the West. He knows that China’s prosperity is inextricably linked with that of the U.S. And he doesn’t even mention the Iranian bomb, now twenty years and counting behind schedule. But somehow, Obama’s foreign policy just lacks the old zip, the old pizazz. I mean, if foreign policy isn’t exciting, poor Fareed, and all his ilk, like the WashPost’s David Ignatius, and the smartboys at the Economist, well, they’ll all be out of a job! And that would be the real tragedy!
Afterwords
It is a fairly obvious fact that the chattering class can endure anything except silence. It was one of Bill Clinton’s few non-self-inflicted problems that he lived in uninteresting times. There was so little to talk about that the Washington press rooted wildly at the slightest scent of any scandal, which Clinton, with his gluttonous self-indulgence, ultimately provided. I guess he was bored too.
