President Obama’s weakness in foreign policy is a contributor to the events of the last several days in the Middle East. Though he gave the order to take out bin Laden — who wouldn’t? — and though he attacks suspected terrorists with drones, this president has nevertheless conveyed to the world that he believes in a diminished world role for the United States.
He believes in a more modest United States — remember those bows — because he comes from an intellectual tradition that is hostile to American power. His pastor and mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, expressed a common leftist view when he said, after 9/11, that the attacks represented “America’s chickens coming home to roost.” Mr. Obama’s one-time green-jobs czar, Van Jones, was of the same school, showing up at a radical leftist rally on September 12, 2001, and, amid the drum circles and curses heaped on the nation that had just suffered an attack of unprecedented savagery, joined in the denunciations of the victim. “It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders.”
As if the U.S. were in the habit of bombing nations just to throw its weight around, or for the sheer joy of dominating and hurting others. In fact, of the last six wars in which the United States was involved (Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya), four were undertaken to rescue Muslims, and the other two (Afghanistan and Iraq) had the side benefit of liberating Muslims — to what end remains an open question.
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