COMMENTARY_ Commentary: Obama must face — not shy away from — foreign affairs

The Palm Beach Post

Posted: 6:18 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2014

Commentary: Obama must face — not shy away from — foreign affairs

By Jeff Bergner

President Barack Obama gives the unmistakable impression that he is annoyed that foreign policy crises have intruded upon his agenda. How irritating that these troubles — in Ukraine and Syria and with the Islamic State — are crowding out the domestic issues the president wishes to address: income inequality, the minimum wage and the like. He was elected to end wars, not to fight them.

How very unfair that the president should have to address such 19th century issues as territorial acquisition and religious fanaticism. But is this really so unique a problem?

George W. Bush, for example, intended to be the “education president” and to represent a new kind of “compassionate conservatism.” If there was a rap against his 2000 campaign, it was that he didn’t speak enough about foreign affairs. His agenda was largely domestic — until 9/11.

In the very first year of his presidency — not the sixth year, as with Obama — everything changed. For better or worse, he will be judged above all else as a foreign policy president.

What about Franklin Roosevelt? Did he seek the rise of Hitler and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — or were these thrust upon him at the same time he addressed a far deeper economic crisis than has Obama?

Or Woodrow Wilson? Was it his agenda to involve America in World War I, or did the European conflagration draw in a reluctant America at the same time Wilson pursued his progressive domestic agenda?

Or Abraham Lincoln? Did he seek the secession of Southern states and the destruction of the union? Or did he try every way he knew to offer reassurances to the Southern states which feared that he would unilaterally alter the Constitution regarding slavery?

American presidents are not free to pursue their own agendas without regard to the challenges the nation and the world throw up to them. They need to rise to those challenges, and they will ultimately be judged by how well they do so.

In the great scheme of things, the foreign policy challenges confronting Obama are relatively minor compared with those that have confronted many other presidents. And it is not just the president.

Over and over we hear that the American public is “war weary.”

We might ask: of what exactly is the American public weary? The burdens and sacrifices of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have fallen entirely on a very small slice of the American population. Those who have served — in some cases, again and again — and their families have borne the entire burden. And the rest of us? The other 95 percent of Americans? What exactly wearies us?

Ninety-five percent of Americans have not served, have not sacrificed and have not expended a dime in new taxes to pay for war (our government preferring instead to borrow the money). British civilian victims of nightly Nazi bombing from 1940 to 1942 had every right to be weary; 95 percent of Americans today could not name one way in which our daily lives have been inconvenienced by war.

What is it that wearies us so? This is neither an argument for or against a war with the Islamic State, a matter which needs to be decided on the merits. It is an argument to grow up and end our perpetual, sloppy self-indulgence, which is daily magnified by the media. Our own problems always look larger than those faced by others. The most cursory look at American history would quickly instruct us otherwise. The president should stop feeling sorry for himself and lead. The rest of us should stop feeling sorry for ourselves, too.

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