Foreign Policy Adventures: No Upsides...
Rarely has foreign policy -- outside of rising oil prices and terror attacks -- been less relevant to American voters. It figures almost not at all in a campaign focused on unemployment, disposable income, and mortgage woes. Republicans are having a hard time finding vulnerabilities in the Obama's foreign policies, I've argued elsewhere, and a consensus has emerged between the two candidates on some of the core foreign-policy issues.
What this means in practical terms is that success abroad -- even spectacular success -- won't mean much in election currency. As long as the administration doesn't allow the Republicans to outflank it on the one foreign issue Americans do care about -- fighting terror -- there's not much upside to risking military action or a big peace initiative that could be messy, costly, and worst of all seen as a failure. In political terms, Obama's Middle East policy has been pretty successful -- killing Osama bin Laden and whacking al Qaeda operatives from one end of the planet to the other, getting out of Iraq, and taking out Muammar al-Qaddafi without owning a mess in Libya. Other issues -- Israeli-Palestinian peace or the Arab spring turned winter -- really don't matter much in terms of the election, unless of course the president stumbles.
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