In praise of the inactive president
Christopher Hitchens and Leon Wieseltier are somewhat exercised by the relative inaction of President Obama in the Libyan crisis.
Me, I say no, don’t get upset by this. Knowing what I do about the president’s instincts, I don’t want him making quick reactions. Snap judgments are not his forte. I prefer him to sit back and wait to see which way the wind blows.
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More realistically, you can see this in both the Canadian prime minister and the American president. The two men are each out of step with their electorates, and so they have built in a hesitation time in their speeches, while the gears whirr and each man asks himself, “All right, can I really say that here?”
So until such time as my two countries can effect a trade, I’m okay with the hesitation time. It’s better than the alternative.
I’m okay with the delayed reaction as well, but simply because splendid isolation has more to recommend it, under the circumstances, than anything else. These events aren’t going to be the Middle East’s 1989 moment, they are its 1979.
Better to stand off and see what brand of replacement autocracies takes root, then figure out if they need to be bought off or undermined.
I’m actually kinda in favour of Splendid Isolation as a foreign policy.
I don’t mind it as a possibility for Canada.
And I have a suspicion that Britain might have been better served by it during the 20th century… might still be an Empire if it’d been followed.
I guess the conventional wisdom is that the Second World War was the one that broke the bank, but how to avert it? Britain would have had to avoid the Great War, or at least managed a decisive victory in which Germany had been occupied—something to signal to would-be NSDAP members that Germany had been soundly beaten and not sold out by its own politicians.
I suppose the question is, would Europe still have been stable in the long term if Austria-Hungary had been allowed to eat/vassalise Serbia, and Germany had been allowed to beat up Russia and France?
If the Brits stay out of the Great War, what of the Bolsheviks? Presumably without British and eventually American support, Germany beating up on France and Russia would have been a much quicker affair. The Romanovs might well have muddled through.
I think they would have — or, at the very least, the republic replacing them would have had a fighting chance at survival.