Victor Davis Hanson uses his latest National Review Online column to draw comparisons between President Obama’s actions this year and Jimmy Carter’s activity in the Oval Office in 1980.
[A]fter just three years, there is a quiet concession that the world remains, well, the world, whether a Texan cowboy or a Chicago community organizer is the president of the United States. Obama’s chief foreign-policy aim now is to hope that nothing much flares up before the November election — at least as long as the race still seems to be tight. In the current political climate of growing isolationism at home, that means more or less putting Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan on ice, and hoping that Israel does not strike Iran’s facilities sometime within the next seven months.
We are in a period of quiet acknowledgment that Obama’s 2009 dreams of a world tamed by hope-and-change rhetoric from a postnational American critic remain largely fantasies; we can only hope that there will be no nightmares in 2012. Obama is not quite Jimmy Carter, who retreated to the Rose Garden during the campaign of 1980 during the Iranian hostage crisis in hopes of seeming engaged while actually being flummoxed and disengaged, but he has adopted the same spirit — a virtual Rose Garden of appearing busy and on top of things, while doing little abroad that could cause turmoil, which in turn could lead to unpopularity at home over yet another messy and costly Middle East commitment.
