Sullivan explains his changed tunes on Syria: "Obama had to make that proposal credible and serious for it to work. Yes, it was a huge risk. Yes, it places a premium on restricting WMDs that may be too ambitious. But it may have paid off. And in the end, a president needs to be judged on results, not news cycles. And those alleging incoherence have not acknowledged that diplomacy – always Obama’s first preference with respect to Syria – sometime requires a deadly serious intent to do something you don’t really want to do. It requires some level of nerve-wracking bluff. Bluff is not incoherence, although it sure can be risky. And a president who can live with that risk is a president with some cast-iron balls. And that’s why the view that this has revealed weakness in Obama seems completely wrong to me. It has revealed steel. And you don’t have to argue that Obama is some kind of Jedi warrior who saw all this from the start (a silly idea) to see that he was able to pivot, shift, test, improvise and flush out new options in a horrible situation as the crisis careened from one moment to another. This is what leadership can be – and you saw a very similar set of patterns in Eisenhower’s administration, and even, as Michael Dobbs noted today, in John F Kennedy’s haphazard, contradictory, and risky maneuvers in the Cuba missile crisis. Eisenhower was ridiculed, and regarded as an idiot from day to day in Washington. Can you imagine what the neocons today would say if a president cut off a war as Eisenhower did in Korea? He’d be Carterized immediately. And Eisenhower was indeed regarded as out of his depth by the hard right, if not an active Communist appeaser. But he endures as one of the greatest foreign policy presidents of the last century."
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 16:47:15 +0000
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