For Obama’s Global Vision, Daunting Problems
By MARK LANDLER and MARK MAZZETTI, NYT
WASHINGTON — President Obama, in one of his most significant speeches since taking office, did not simply declare an end to the post-9/11 era on Thursday. He also offered a vision of America’s role in the world that he hopes could be one of his lasting legacies.
It is an ambitious vision — one that eschews a muscle-bound foreign policy, dominated by the military and intelligence services, in favor of energetic diplomacy, foreign aid and a more measured response to terrorism. But it is fraught with risks, and hostage to forces that are often out of the president’s control.
From the grinding civil war in Syria and the extremist threat in Yemen to the toxic American relationship with Pakistan and the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan with no clear sense of what comes afterward, there are a multitude of hurdles to Mr. Obama’s goal of taking America off “perpetual war footing.”
One of the most daunting is a sprawling wartime bureaucracy that, after nearly a dozen years, has amassed great influence and has powerful supporters on Capitol Hill. It will be difficult to roll back what has been a gradual militarization of American foreign policy, even in an era of budget cuts for the Pentagon.
(More here.)
WASHINGTON — President Obama, in one of his most significant speeches since taking office, did not simply declare an end to the post-9/11 era on Thursday. He also offered a vision of America’s role in the world that he hopes could be one of his lasting legacies.
It is an ambitious vision — one that eschews a muscle-bound foreign policy, dominated by the military and intelligence services, in favor of energetic diplomacy, foreign aid and a more measured response to terrorism. But it is fraught with risks, and hostage to forces that are often out of the president’s control.
From the grinding civil war in Syria and the extremist threat in Yemen to the toxic American relationship with Pakistan and the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan with no clear sense of what comes afterward, there are a multitude of hurdles to Mr. Obama’s goal of taking America off “perpetual war footing.”
One of the most daunting is a sprawling wartime bureaucracy that, after nearly a dozen years, has amassed great influence and has powerful supporters on Capitol Hill. It will be difficult to roll back what has been a gradual militarization of American foreign policy, even in an era of budget cuts for the Pentagon.
(More here.)
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