Post-Pax Americana

Bret Stephens, Foreign affairs correspondent
for the Wall Street Journal
interviewed on Fox News

I really thought after Obama's latest press conference that he was going to leave his vacation behind, and resume his official duties.

When he didn't, that is when I began to wonder if he really has no interest in changing (I would say improving) the world's events, but rather he wants to reduce America's strength.

Below I've transcribed Bret Stephens' interview on Fox News, where he discusses his Wall Street Journal article The Post-Pax Americana World. This transcript is only of the first 21/2 minutes of the five minute interview.

The question is why is [this administration's foreign policy] failing. And there are three schools of thought. Basically, what liberals will tell you is that the world is this terribly complicated place. America is in decline. The President simply can't control events around the world. And Obama sometimes likes to explain himself that way. The second theory, somewhat more convincing, is this a simply an out of touch president who is not really giving this job his full attention. Maybe its because he won reelection he feels his legacy is secure. But time and again, the President is caught flat-footed by events. Some of his best advisers complain that he is just indifferent to the details of governance.

This is a very important insight:

The argument that I'm making in this article is it's not simply that. This is a president whose pursuing an ideological goal, which has reduced America's footprint. Environmentalists say reduce, reuse, recycle, in a sense that's Obama's view for the United States. He wants a smaller footprint for the United States around the world, and as American power and influence shrinks, you have all of these groups coming up, seeking to fill the void.

And his optimistic analysis, with which I agree:

America is in retreat, but I don't think America is in decline. When people tell you "you know, America is in decline,' hey, this is a country where fracking is happening, this is a country where iPhones are being made, I mean in so many ways there's a renaissance of American ingenuity, [which is] simply being gummed up by a regulatory state, but a president who doesn't believe in the very things that make this country great. The resources, the ingenuity, the capacity for self-renewal is in this country. The problem is not having an administration that is taking advantage of it.

I've been waiting for someone to corroborate my thoughts on the current state of affairs regarding President Obama's decisions. My thoughts are that Obama's decisions on domestic and foreign affairs are not due to incompetence, as many commentators have written, but that they are ideological decisions. I don't believe that Obama likes America as it is now, and is determined to change it.

It was by chance that I tuned into the last twenty minutes of the above O'Reilly Report on Fox New. I don't usually watch O'Reilly's program, although other Fox commentators (Megyn Kelly, Chris Wallace, Bret Baer and Brit Hume) provide intelligent insights.

This is the first paragraph from Stephen's Wall Street Journal article:

[We] are not in a post-American world of diminishing U.S. influence. We are in a post-Pax Americana world of collapsing U.S. will. Britain, it was once said, gained her empire "in a fit of absence of mind." Now Barack Obama is relinquishing U.S. dominance with about the same degree of mindfulness, and Americans seem content to go along with it.

The Islamic world can make three conclusions about the United States' current position:

a. America, or the American president, is not taking this enemy seriously
b. America, or the American president, is too weak to retaliate to this enemy
c. America, or the American president, agrees with the positions of the "enemy"

Stephens has articulated that "c" is the most likely explanation for Obama's behavior.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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