[Vision2020] Barack Obama and Reinhold Niebuhr

[Sunil Ramalingam]

Pat,

Can you explain how Reid insulted the military?

Sunil


>From: "Pat Kraut" <pkraut at moscow.com>
>To: "vision2020" <vision2020 at moscow.com>
>Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Barack Obama and Reinhold Niebuhr
>Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:12:51 -0700
>
>I wouldn't count on that dem stuff...Reid has insulted the military and
>others way too far.
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <nickgier at adelphia.net>
>To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
>Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 9:55 AM
>Subject: [Vision2020] Barack Obama and Reinhold Niebuhr
>
>
>Greetings:
>
>It is possible that America will elect a president who can talk
>intelligently and deeply about fundamental issues, even the theology of
>Reinhold Niebuhr??!  With the prospect of the Senate going heavily
>Democratic in 2008, it looks like America may soon be turning a ideological
>corner.
>
>Nick Gier, intellectual mutant
>
>April 26, 2007, The New York Times
>Op-Ed Columnist
>Obama, Gospel and Verse
>By DAVID BROOKS
>
>Sometimes you take a shot.
>
>Yesterday evening I was interviewing Barack Obama and we were talking about
>effective foreign aid programs in Africa. His voice was measured and
>fatigued, and he was taking those little pauses candidates take when 
>they’re
>afraid of saying something that might hurt them later on.
>
>Out of the blue I asked, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?”
>
>Obama’s tone changed. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite 
>philosophers.”
>
>So I asked, What do you take away from him?
>
>“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling 
>idea that
>there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should 
>be
>humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we
>shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away 
>...
>the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not
>swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”
>
>My first impression was that for a guy who’s spent the last few months
>fund-raising, and who was walking off the Senate floor as he spoke, 
>that’s a
>pretty good off-the-cuff summary of Niebuhr’s “The Irony of American
>History.” My second impression is that his campaign is an attempt to 
>thread
>the Niebuhrian needle, and it’s really interesting to watch.
>
>On the one hand, Obama hates, as Niebuhr certainly would have, the grand
>Bushian rhetoric about ridding the world of evil and tyranny and
>transforming the Middle East. But he also dislikes liberal 
>muddle-headedness
>on power politics. In “The Audacity of Hope,” he says liberal 
>objectives
>like withdrawing from Iraq, stopping AIDS and working more closely with our
>allies may be laudable, “but they hardly constitute a coherent national
>security policy.”
>
>In Chicago this week, Obama argued against the current tides of Democratic
>opinion. There’s been a sharp rise in isolationism among Democrats,
>according to a recent Pew survey, so Obama argued for global engagement.
>Fewer Democrats believe in peace through military strength, so Obama argued
>for increasing the size of the military.
>
>In other words, when Obama is confronted by what he sees as arrogant
>unilateral action, he argues for humility. When he is confronted by what he
>sees as dovish passivity, he argues for the hardheaded promotion of
>democracy in the spirit of John F. Kennedy.
>
>The question is, aside from rejecting the extremes, has Obama thought
>through a practical foreign policy doctrine of his own — a way to apply 
>his
>Niebuhrian instincts?
>
>That question is hard to answer because he loves to have conversations 
>about
>conversations. You have to ask him every question twice, the first time to
>allow him to talk about how he would talk about the subject, and the second
>time so you can pin him down to the practical issues at hand.
>
>If you ask him about the Middle East peace process, he will wax rhapsodic
>about the need to get energetically engaged. He’ll talk about the shared
>interests all have in democracy and prosperity. But then when you ask him
>concretely if the U.S. should sit down and talk with Hamas, he says no.
>“There’s no point in sitting down so long as Hamas says Israel 
>doesn’t have
>the right to exist.”
>
>When you ask about ways to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, he
>talks grandly about marshaling a global alliance. But when you ask
>specifically if an Iranian bomb would be deterrable, he’s says yes: “I 
>think
>Iran is like North Korea. They see nuclear arms in defensive terms, as a 
>way
>to prevent regime change.”
>
>In other words, he has a tendency to go big and offer himself up as Bromide
>Obama, filled with grand but usually evasive eloquence about bringing 
>people
>together and showing respect. Then, in a blink, he can go small and
>concrete, and sound more like a community organizer than George F. Kennan.
>
>Finally, more than any other major candidate, he has a tendency to see the
>world in post-national terms. Whereas President Bush sees the war against
>radical Islam as the organizing conflict of our time, Obama sees radical
>extremism as one problem on a checklist of many others: global poverty,
>nuclear proliferation, global warming. When I asked him to articulate the
>central doctrine of his foreign policy, he said, “The single objective of
>keeping America safe is best served when people in other nations are secure
>and feel invested.”
>
>That’s either profound or vacuous, depending on your point of view.
>
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