Crisis without World Police

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/234689/crisis-without-world-police/

As long as the Putins of this world pursue gunboat politics in the style of the late 19th century, Obama’s foreign policy for the 21st century is doomed to failure.

Crisis without World Police
Berliner Zeitung, Germany
By Damir Fras
Translated By LeAnn Kearney
4 March 2014
Edited by Jane Lee

When George W. Bush moved into the White House in January 2001, he had no clue about foreign policy. Not until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 the same year did the inexperienced ex-governor of Texas become the president who marched his troops first into Afghanistan and later into Iraq. Bush availed himself of a military doctrine that had been in force since the time of the Vietnam War: Whoever provokes the U.S. should reckon with an invasion. So it was in Panama and in Grenada, so it was in the first Gulf War. The only new thing under Bush was the impudence with which the U.S. government lied and constructed a reason, under false pretenses, for the overthrow of Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein.

When Barack Obama moved into the White House in January 2009, he also had no clue about foreign policy. In contrast to Bush, however, the former senator from Illinois was honest from the beginning. Prompted by the belief that the American populace was tired of the wars, Obama promised to end the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the long term, the U.S. should also give up its role as solitary global police officer. And for a couple of years it seemed as if Obama would do exactly what those disappointed by Bush had longed for: consultation instead of going it alone, diplomacy instead of conflict.

Not to be misunderstood: Bush was a nasty hawk, not out of conviction, but rather driven by his neoconservative advisers. However, Obama is also no nice little dove of peace, and that actually is out of conviction. He reserves the right to decide which suspected terrorists are killed with unmanned drones. And that’s worldwide. War is also for Obama, in principle, an instrument of politics. He only conducts it differently than Bush — in the dark, in secret. Whether that’s better than an open battlefield remains to be seen. The number of civilians killed is in any case smaller.

The U.S. president wants to establish a new U.S. foreign policy for the 21st century, because the Americans are war-weary. They, like Obama, do not want their soldiers to have to fight a war in some faraway spot. They want “nation building” in their own country, whose infrastructure in some areas can hardly be distinguished from that of a developing country.