Professor Samuel Moyn has written a wise essay about debuts in American foreign policy. He is right to say that Barack Obama was much more ruthless about the use of force than he initially pretended — in the manner of Count Walewski — to be. Something the former president might say in his defence is that he did not choose war over peace so much as his desire to demonstrate his executive competence surpassed any qualms he may have had over killing the nation’s putative enemies, including its own citizens. He might add another crime qua mistake, which was to misalign his decisions on the use of force with his diplomacy. There are a couple of explanations for it besides incompetence. One is that many people continue to understand the meanings of force and diplomacy ahistorically as opposed rather than coterminous; another is that unilateralism is a very hard ’ism to fight against if one is intellectually lazy. Which means that Obama’s decisions to use force (or not) were primarily exhibitionistic — so, neither utilitarian nor principled, and therefore doubly tragic, notably in Libya and Syria, which were directly related, as even a diplomatic novice could see.
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