Obama's foreign policy is overweight in the Middle East.
I'm just getting started on Ryan Lizza's big piece on the Obama administration's foreign policy, but this bit jumped out at me from the opening:
One of Donilonâ??s overriding beliefs, which Obama adopted as his own, was that America needed to rebuild its reputation, extricate itself from the Middle East and Afghanistan, and turn its attention toward Asia and Chinaâ??s unchecked influence in the region. America was â??overweightedâ? in the former and â??underweightedâ? in the latter, Donilon told me. â??Weâ??ve been on a little bit of a Middle East detour over the course of the last ten years,â? Kurt Campbell, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said. â??And our future will be dominated utterly and fundamentally by developments in Asia and the Pacific region.â?
So what has the administration done during its first years in office? Well, they launched a major effort to rekindle Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, surged tens of thousands of additional troops into Afghanistan (while quietly moving out the timeline for withdrawal to 2014), escalated military strikes in Pakistan and jumped into the middle of Libya's civil war.
For an administration intent on refocusing American foreign policy away from the Middle East and "unwinding" America's wars, they sure seem to have gone about it in a strange way.
(AP Photo)
