download

In a stunning report, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes gave a candid observation of how the Obama Administration views U.S. foreign policy and the foreign policy establishment.

In the New York Times Magazine, reporter David Samuels, penned an article titled, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru”   in which he extensively interviews Ben Rhodes and his close relationship with the president as it relates to U.S. foreign policy.

In previous administrations, presidents have always had a close confidant in foreign affairs, almost always it was someone who had extensive experience in the international arena, but President Obama’s chose to have someone who had no experience, and ironically received his master degree in creative writing.

President’s, for variety of reason only known to them, choose to listen or seek advice regarding foreign policy from at least someone who has had experience in international affairs, but this president’s close confidant is someone with virtually no experience, and it’s even a mystery to the president’s supporters.

President Fails to Listen Foreign Policy Experts

As the president began his administration he had strong foreign policy experts, such as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, former National Security Adviser General James Jones and a host of others, but with the turbulent world we currently live in its astonishing that the president would seek the advice of someone devoid of any international experience.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in both the Bush and Obama administration mentioned in a Politico magazine story in January, that during the “Arab Spring” revolution, which had engulfed Egypt, President Obama listened to his younger aides instead of his seasoned older foreign policy experts on how to handle the situation.

Younger aides held the president’s ear, like Rhodes, Samantha Power and Antony Blinken, then Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser urged Obama to get “on the right side of history” and give Mubarak a decisive push. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would later describe them in her memoir as being “swept up in the drama and idealism of the moment.” She, along with other elders like Gates and then-national security adviser Tom Donilon, warned of unintended consequences. Obama’s then chief of staff, William Daley, would listen to Rhodes in White House meetings and wonder what he really knew about Egypt.

In the New York Times magazine piece, Samuels writes that part of what accounts for Rhodes’s influence is his “mind meld” with the president. Nearly everyone I spoke to about Rhodes used the phrase “mind meld” verbatim, some with casual assurance and others in the hushed tones that are usually reserved for special insights. He doesn’t think for the president, but he knows what the president is thinking, which is a source of tremendous power. One day, when Rhodes and I were sitting in his boiler-room office, he confessed, with a touch of bafflement, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”

It seems President Obama and his loyal followers in his administration came into office with the singular focus of repudiating the foreign policy of President George Bush and signaling to rest of the world a radical shift in American foreign policy.

Contempt for Foreign policy Establishment

Rhodes, as Samuels writes, had developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour. If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

This is the same thought process President Obama has; and even mentioned the same theme in his own interview with a Jeffry Goldberg piece in “The Atlantic” in March titled “The Obama Doctrine.”

In his interview President Obama clearly distains the foreign policy establishment and the group of think tanks clustered around Washington as a potent force, but one that needs to be handled and nurtured.

Far too often President Obama believes he is smarter than everyone else, and others just don’t understand what he is trying to accomplish. This persona manifested itself when the president tried to convince his fellow Democrats in gaining their support for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) trade legislation.

Many Democrats came out of the meeting frustrated, feeling that the president kept reiterating that ‘you just need to trust me, I know what is best’, discounting them as uninformed on the issues, and assuring them he knows best.

Famed military analyst Thomas Ricks writes in Foreign Policy,  and perhaps the key sentence is this: “His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.”

The question which the author of the New York Times Magazine should have asked at the end of his interview should have been, if you believe in President Obama’s new direction in foreign policy, why is the world in such chaos and worse off than when Obama took office?

The World in Chaos

Max Boot, writing in Commentary Magazine, issued a stunning rebuke of the Obama administration’s handling of foreign policy.

If the president and his senior adviser are such geniuses by comparison, why have they presided over a steady deterioration of the American position of the world? Why, on their watch, has China stepped up its aggression in the South China Sea? Why has Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea? Why has Libya descended into chaos along with Iraq and Yemen? Why has Syria been torn apart by a civil war that has killed nearly half a million people and sent millions of refugees flooding neighboring states? Why has an Islamic State arisen in the heart of the Middle East along with numerous other terrorist groups? Why is Iran, the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism, more powerful than it has ever been since the ancient heyday of the Persian Empire?”

Now, as the United States enters the final six months of the presidential election campaign of 2016, it’s time to begin asking both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, what is there vision for U.S. foreign policy? The second question should be, who are your foreign and military advisers?

It is clearly time we get the major league all-star team of experts and not the tea-ball league of rudimentary experts; if not it will be a long four years.