Some impressions on a potential voting down of Syrian intervention in the House. "It is to President Obama’s great discredit that he has staked this credibility on a vote whose outcome he failed to game out in advance. But if he loses that vote, the national interest as well as his political interests will take a tangible hit: for the next three years, American foreign policy will be in the hands of a president whose promises will ring consistently hollow, and whose ability to make good on his strategic commitments will be very much in doubt." - Ross Douthat "I think Ross is hyper-ventilating. The simple fact is that American power was largely destroyed by the previous administration: Bush and Cheney both managed to gut US credibility on intelligence and prove that our vast military supremacy counts for nothing when it comes to actually bending the world to our will (see Iraq). Obama inherited that destroyed soft and hard power and has done his best with it. But the destruction itself was instructive. After the end of the Cold War, with no huge conventional military rival or threat, the US war-machine was far too big for the needs it was supposed to serve; and global views of America had soured more profoundly than at any point since the Second World War. The result is too big a weapon with too little international support. That’s one reason why Syria, a very tough issue in any era, is so particularly difficult for the US right now." - Andrew Sullivan "Presidents Ford and Carter faced much more serious rebukes from Congress in foreign policy where there was far clearer damage to Presidential credibility. We don’t generally count their Presidencies as successes – but America’s foreign policy was not crippled. If President Obama loses this vote, he will just have to count his votes more carefully in the future before committing himself where America does not already have clear and binding treaty obligations. Why again would that be so terrible?" - Noah Millman "Presidents suffer defeats all the time. Obama lost on cap-and-trade. He’s lost on plenty of judicial and executive branch nominations. He couldn’t get agreement for a grand bargain. He lost on gun control. What’s more, Republicans have been opposing him on virtually everything from the day he took office. In what concrete way would a defeat on Syria change this dynamic in even the slightest way?" - Kevin Drum
Posted on: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 19:12:11 +0000
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