It's Foreign Policy, Stupid

“It’s the economy, stupid,” is a zinger most attributed to Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign to replace George H. W. Bush as president.  It was actually James Carville who uttered those famous words to his campaign staff so they could continue to hammer Bush on the modest recession that was afoot.  The economy did indeed dominate the political rhetoric that year and Clinton’s hammering away on Bush’s handling of 5% unemployment is likely what elected him. 

It also missed the point by a mile on what presidents are supposed to do.  They can create policies to encourage economic growth, as Reagan did, but beyond that, they don’t and can’t micromanage the economy.  What the Framers had in mind for the president was to be an advocate for American influence, protect the American people from enemies, and be the Commander In Chief.  They certainly didn’t think he would end up being something like a greeter at a Costco.

How else to explain that in the midst of a tight election, the leader of the free world, such as it is now, was in a group handshake with doctors in white coats who had just come back from Africa after treating Ebola patients?  To so trivialize the role of the president to settle for a photo op says all too much about what the job has become.

No presidential candidate in the last 30 years knew what was ahead of him or her as they were running for the office.  On domestic issues, they knew they could nibble around some abstract policy agenda and figure they wouldn’t collapse the country.  But none of them could predict what to expect on foreign policy.

When Obama ran for the office in 2008, it was his pledge to end the wars in the Middle East and close down Guantanamo that propelled him into the White House.  Even Hilary’s “3 a.m. wake-up call” didn’t impress the voters.  Obama ran on the same platform of ideas in 2012 and won again on promoting a peaceful world that was just beginning to explode around him.  He’s not the only president that misjudged the events of the world to come; he’s just the poster child for it.

On his watch, and presidents always have to wear these watches, Iraq (and soon Afghanistan) have erupted into brutal violence.  It makes no difference that the previous administration set the stage for this, Obama’s lack of focus on “winning the peace” gives him the hairshirt for it now.  He wears it also for creating the vacuum that has been sucked up by Putin as he saber rattles around anyone he can in search of relevance; for turning his back on Iran and North Korea so he didn’t have to watch them rebuild their nuclear ambition; for another back-turning on our friend the dictator of Egypt to bring in a worse dictator that wanted to bring the country back to the 8^th Century; to having the most blurry “red lines” in the history of red lines that caused friends and enemies alike to snicker and sneer about U.S. influence and power; to alienating our allies and causing one, Saudi Arabia, to say it’s better to be an enemy of the U.S. because they would get better treatment if they were.

One could talk longer on the foreign policy missteps by this president but it would be to miss the point.  Every election may be about breadbasket and pocketbook soundbites by the first Tuesday in November, but foreign policy finds a way to be the dominant issue during the presidency.  Clinton stupidly found out it wasn’t only the economy.  He learned he had to make a tough decision on Serbia and then hid under his desk and left it to Madeleine Albright and Wesley Clark to decide.  George W. Bush ran on the trivial theme of being the “education” president and will forever be known as the architect on the lost war on terror.  Even his father couldn’t have predicted during his election campaign of the changes that were about to come in the geo-political landscape with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and a war that proposed less blurry red lines in Iraq.

Our world is unstable and scant little attention is paid to it during any election cycle – or day after day as there is no real end to the cycle any longer.  Instead of focusing on the supposed war on women, income inequality, Ebola, Obamacare and everything else that pundits say goes bump in the night, the focus ought to be what else could go wrong in the world -- outside our borders.

Foreign-policy planners and national leaders in Moscow, Tehran and Beijing get up every day and do one thing: think about how they can diminish or destabilize the U.S. Our leadership got up every day for six years and thought about . . . wind farms.  This president has two more years to lead this country and he ought to think less about fundraising and local political battles and more about the battles that will be brought in the front door from any of the hot spots in the world.  If he can’t or won’t, Congress should pass a law requiring the president to play golf for the next two years and let somebody else have a go at doing the job.  It couldn’t be any worse.