U.S. Needs Less Activist Foreign Policy

Thick histories may well be written about how President Obama: a Democrat from the leftward wing of his party, a use-of-force skeptic who campaigned against Iraq as a war of choice, came to involve the U.S. in a third Mideastern war. Much will be made of the regrets of a generation of party leaders that the U.S. did not move in 1994 in Rwanda, but that nation's experience raises as many questions as it answers. Rwanda was a real and actual genocide in which, in the Human Rights Watch estimate, 800,000 people were killed. Some say it was a million. Libya, in contrast, was a civil war with a dictator only threatening brutality toward his myriad foes. And a great nation's foreign policy can't be built on regrets, it can't be built only on emotion, it has to be more steely-eyed than that, more responsive to immediate and long-term strategic needs.