Uglysasquatch wrote:
I get a kick out of "crumbling foreign policy" given the state of America's foreign relations prior to Obama taking office.
I suppose that depends on whether you place more importance on some assumed result of "relations" rather than actual results in terms of foreign policy. Obama's certainly gone with the "if we're nice to them, they'll be nice to us" approach. And if you assume that this will produce better results, you'll judge the previous policy as "bad" and this one as "good".
The problem is that the outcomes don't match that theory, do they? As much as the left claimed that Bush's policy would anger people and create more problems, the reality is that during his watch we experienced a number of positive outcomes in the Middle East and were turning around a pattern of increased violence from extremist organizations within the region while building the strength to resist those forces among the governments in that same region. Under Obama, Afghanistan has collapsed into complete failure, several governments have toppled and been replaced with ones much more aligned with said extremists (or at least less able to resist them), and we're watching our embassies in the region burn. His idea that they'd like him because he was "on their side" (so to speak) didn't work. They're burning him in effigy as well.
At some point, one really should re-assess one's assumptions about which type of foreign policy is really better.