President Barack Obama's foreign policy has collapsed amid conflicting messages about how to manage the threat of the Islamic State (ISIS) and a track record of mistakes in the Middle East, said Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review.
In an
opinion piece for Politico Magazine, Lowry says that Republican hawks who have long warned of the disastrous consequences of a weak foreign policy have been proven right.
"What we have been witnessing the past few weeks, in real time, is the intellectual collapse of Obama's foreign policy, accompanied by its rapid political unraveling," Lowry wrote.
Lowry said that Obama's policies toward al-Qaida, the crisis in the Middle East, and Iraq and Syria have all been misguided.
"We elected a president with the middle name of Hussein who did all he could to liquidate George W. Bush's foreign policy and made outreach to the Muslim world one of his top priorities — yet the terror threat has grown."
By contrast, Lowry contends, predictions by Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain, for example, of the dangers of pulling out of Iraq have come to fruition.
"It is not that the latest events in Iraq and Syria necessarily vindicate a rigorously McCainite foreign policy," Lowry wrote. "Events have vindicated the surge that devastated the forerunner of ISIL and demonstrated the folly of Obama’s total pullout from Iraq, the point at which the country began its downward slide."
He added that the folly of Obama's foreign policy doctrine, summarized by the president as "don't do stupid stuff," is most evident in Syria.
"We didn't invade, we didn't bomb, we didn't even really try to create an allied rebel force on the ground," Lowry said. "ISIL has established a base from which to launch operations in Iraq. This is not only a humanitarian catastrophe but a disaster for our interests, and more and more people are recognizing it as such."
Lowry said the president's remarks on Wednesday that he intended to reduce the threat of ISIS to a "manageable problem" are not only vague but entirely misguided.
"President Obama has said of President Bush's alleged approach to the world, every problem looks like a nail. By the same token, when the only tool you have is retreat, every problem looks 'manageable.'"
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