Talk politics.

FDR and JFK were pretty popular both at home and abroad: but I suppose neither are really in living memory, excepting to oldsters like me. Clinton was popular abroad, but rather got up the nose of a few folk with very specific agenda at home. But I think you'll have to give me the fact that he was popular enough to get re-elected (unless it was the economy - doh!)

I'd say that the American people are much like people anywhere. Foreign policy from the until-recently-top-nation was never going to make it popular. But China is looked on less favourably than the US in the same poll.

Try as I might I can't see 'the rest of the world' having common interests, excepting the human ones applicable to all. It seems they don't even all hate America anymore.

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I think the rest of the world were fearful of Bush's belligerent rhetoric. Regardless of whether or not there's any practical difference between Obama and Bush, Obama doesn't come off as though he's swaggering around looking for a fight like a drunken pirate.

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I think his decision to invade Iraq, which had no WMDs, but leave alone North Korea, which *did* develop them, is one reason every potential invasion-target is going to be trying to get nukes of their own. Unfortunately President Dumbass happened to have the reverse Midas-touch on much more than that....

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Yep, and people wonder why Iran wants nukes. Nuclear Iran gets left alone, non-nuclear Iran gets invaded.

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fleaplus.livejournal.com

> I think his decision to invade Iraq, which had no WMDs, but leave alone North Korea, which *did* develop them, is one reason every potential invasion-target is going to be trying to get nukes of their own.

I suspect that the artillery targeted at Seoul is/was much more of a factor than North Korea's largely non-deployable rudimentary nukes.

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I've decided to be as arch on the comms (if that's the contraction I'm looking for) as I am in real life. Did you read the Stiglitz thing?

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Much of JFK was that he was martyred before his Presidency proved unable to do anything on Civil Rights and before his involvement in the Vietnam War escalated to the degree that LBJ took it. FDR lived in an era when there was an enemy of sufficient power and ruthlessness that the common interests of the UK, USSR, and USA were all served more by his destruction than his defeat.

Like with Lincoln, I have doubts on if he'dve been effective after the war to anything of the degree he was in it.

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The USA is the premier imperial power. The other countries of the world end up forming balancing alliances to limit US power, and that reality underlies the tension. In effect the Strength Is Weakness paradox.

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The US doesn't need to be popular or take note of anything the rest of the world thinks, does it?

Yes, they do. It's called Soft Power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power) and would help to keep America safe whilst simultaneously reducing the military budget.

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That's what's known as 'red rag to a bull'. You can't expect people who think with their muscles or trigger-fingers to take anything that sounds as pansy as 'soft power' seriously now, can you?

Egads, next you'll being saying there's a place for diplomacy in the world: then where would we be? War-war, not jaw-jaw, surely: this is foreign policy we're talking about. How else would the US justify its military spending. What's the point in having a big dick if you don't swing it about haphazardly once in a while?

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I would argue that the US definitely needs to be doing everything it can to reduce its spending.

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The kicker about Soft Power is that it has to have a correlating *potential* for Kicking Ass. If Kiribati starts attempting Soft Power nobody gives a damn. For that matter, if *Somalia* started it, nobody would give a damn about that. Soft Power can only work with a correspondingly powerful military to make the carrot more palatable than the stick.

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I'm not saying that soft power can opperate in the absence of hard power, but I would argue that if you have strong soft power you don't need as strong hard power because, as you said, the military just has to be there as a threat. Think of how thinly stretched the US military is at the moment, their hard power is not what it was a decade ago. However, with a military half the size, without Iraq and Afghanistan, they would be more potentially threatening.

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koneko-desu.livejournal.com

Whoa, someone's a little paranoid. It's funny how Americans can be so suspicious of their own while still preaching about tolerance to other countries. Relax, the rest of the world doesn't have enough free time to think about you as much as you seem to believe, it's just sometimes you're a little hard to ignore...but then again, so are mosquitoes.

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Ah, but I'm not an American. :)

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verytwistedmind.livejournal.com

I think the important question is, what has this new found popularity done for America in it's foriegn affairs?

Have Obama's colitions/alliances/treaties been more successful than Bush's?

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That depends on lots of things, no doubt: most of which history will be better at judging than I.

I withhold personal judgement until I've seen the butcher's bill, but thus far it ain't looking as bad as it might.

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telemann.livejournal.com

Definitely: the two recent agreements just on nuclear weapons and materials are the first things to come to mind.

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I would find myself more enthusiastic about this if it wasn't for the simple reality that Obama happens to believe that flipping the bird to our allies is a good way to have diplomatic relations.

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Israel may be a special case because of circumstance.

The rest of the world knows he's gotta do what the POTUS has gotta do. But he seems to be doing it in a nicer way than the previous incumbent.

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I'm talking about his track-record with the EU.

And I'm not entirely sure that drones are all that much nicer than people, m'self.

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And despite the track record with the EU, the EU still regards him positively.

From the outside, he doesn't seem as much of a drone as a man constrained by the political requirement of dragging a right-wing rump of secessionist wannabes kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Or let the aforementioned rump try to break the Union.

Last time that happened, the issue was forced. I doubt that Obama would want that on his watch: though others might.

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Well, if the big leaders of that are people like Berlusconi, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Brown...IMHO it's less that they like him and more that they want to still be President or Prime Minister and hope his popularity saves their bacon.

I was referring to the use of UAVs in the Afghanistan War. Apologies if I was unclear.

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My mistake.

Afghanistan is a disaster, true.

A disaster caused in some respects by the brilliant use of the Napoleonic military strategy of opening up a second front (in this case also 5000-odd miles away from home) on a pretext.

However, for hundreds of years no-one has managed to pacify Afghanistan, so....even without divided forces and an unjust war elsewhere it's time for me to roll over and play dead on this one. :)

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Well, it's a disaster 30 years in the making, and President Obama would have to be a literal Physical God to have a possibility of putting Humpty-Dumpty together again. 30 years of warfare since the Soviet invasion and now since we've been playing at being the British Empire there 10 years of *our* bombing and shooting it up......that's not good for anyone.

True, nobody's managed to pacify it because the Great Powers are too humane these days to use the methods Tamerlane did. Of course it's easy to win a war if you define victory as how many skulls of your enemies you can put in a single pile....

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fizzyland.livejournal.com

Cutting off aid would have been better.

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reality-hammer.livejournal.com

The US should always do the right thing, whether the rest of the world agrees or not.

It's going to be hard to convince nations that are profiting from trade with a rogue nation to take sufficient measures against that nation which endanger their profits. Go without them if you have to.

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mrsilence.livejournal.com

The US should always do the right thing, whether the rest of the world agrees or not.

The thing is, this assumes that the U.S. knows what the right thing is.

The problem is, when one has power so great that it is largely unrestrained by others, what is in one's own interest has an uncanny knack of looking remarkably like what is right. Meanwhile what is actually right slips further and further away from what is in one's own interests.

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RH would believe what is in America's interest is what is right. He's a jackass like that.

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green-man-2010.livejournal.com

*Nods*
Confucius says -
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...

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