The Washington Post finally gets a clue

Or at least its staff writer Richard Cohen finally, and much too late, realizes the truth about President Obama and foreign policy:

He is a 21st-century man who never quite appreciated the lessons of the 20th. He has been all too happy to preside over the loss of American influence. Aleppo, Syria, now a pile of rubble, is where countless died — as did American influence. ...

He waved a droopy flag. He did not want to make America great again. It was great enough for him already. ...

That coolness, that no-drama Obama, cost lives in Syria. Instead of rallying the United States to a worthy cause — intervening to save lives and avoid a refugee crisis that is still destabilizing Europe — he threw in the towel. The banner he flew was one of American diminishment. ...

Since the end of World War II, American leadership has been essential to maintain world peace. Whether we liked it or not, we were the world’s policeman. There was no other cop on the beat. Now that leadership is gone. So, increasingly, will be peace.

When then-candidate Obama said in the '08 campaign that he would "fundamentally transform" the US, what did people think he meant if not this?



In 2014, when China was on the verge of passing the US as an economic power, I pointed for the Left, that would be a feature, not a bug:

In Leftist mindset, America is the main cause (if not the only cause) of the misery of the rest of the world. The world has been literally suffering from a United States that is too rich, too militarily powerful and too capitalist for the health of the world. And this is exactly the world view of our president and all his top operatives. For the United States to be displaced from its "perch" is not merely laudatory, in their view it is positively desirable.

As one commentator wrote, this president thinks that the United States casts too much a shadow on the rest of the world, but failed to understand that it's either that or have Russia and China cast shadows on us.