Obama on the state of the world: the extended Vox conversation

[jakeXT]

Barack Obama

You know, traditionally, a lot of American foreign policy has been divided into the realist camp and the idealist camp. And so if you're an idealist, you're like Woodrow Wilson, and you're out there with the League of Nations and imagining everybody holding hands and singing "Kumbaya" and imposing these wonderful rules that everybody's abiding by. And if you're a realist, then you're supporting dictators who happen to be our friends, and you're cutting deals and solely pursuing the self-interest of our country as narrowly defined. And I just don't think that describes what a smart foreign policy should be.


...


I think it is realistic for us to want to use diplomacy for setting up a rules-based system wherever we can, understanding that it's not always going to work. If we have arms treaties in place, it doesn't mean that you don't have a stray like North Korea that may try to do its own thing. But you've reduced the number of problems that you have and the security and defense challenges that you face if you can create those norms. And one of the great things about American foreign policy in the post-World War II era was that we did a pretty good job with that. It wasn't perfect, but the UN, the IMF, and a whole host of treaties and rules and norms that were established really helped to stabilize the world in ways that it wouldn't otherwise be.

Now, I also think that if we were just resorting to that and we didn't have a realistic view that there are bad people out there who are trying to do us harm — and we've got to have the strongest military in the world, and we occasionally have to twist the arms of countries that wouldn't do what we need them to do if it weren't for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military leverage that we had — if we didn't have that dose of realism, we wouldn't get anything done, either. So what I do think is accurate in describing my foreign policy is a strong belief that we don't have military solutions to every problem in the 21st century. That we don't have a peer in terms of a state that's going to attack us and bait us. The closest we have, obviously, is Russia, with its nuclear arsenal, but generally speaking they can't project the way we can around the world. China can't, either. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined. 2

So the biggest challenge we have right now is disorder. Failed states. Asymmetric threats from terrorist organizations. And what I've been trying to do is to make sure that over the course of the last six years and hopefully the next two, we just have more tools in our toolkit to deal with the actual problems that we have now and that we can project into the future, rather than just constantly relying on the same tools that we used when we were dealing with Germany and Japan in World War II.

...

http://www.vox.com/a/barack-obama-interview-vox-conversation/obama-foreign-policy-transcript

[Fred Sanders]

1. A wonderful interview, surely to be cherry picked or ignored by the mass media that has

turned entirely to ambulance chasing and exaggerating the threats of terrorism, crime and anything else they can exaggerate and fluff to generate fear and ratings.

Three fucking days and the mass media still is not sure if ISIL lies or not? WTF?

King Abdullah The Dictator and his 3 airplane Air Force to the rescue? Has the media ever reported that America is conducting 90 % of the Airstrikes in Syria, 100 % in Iraq, and ALL the aerial support and search and rescue everywhere?

And now ISIS is supposed to be trembling at the wrath of an impotent desert King? Will Americans swallow that lie whole as well because it gets the old American vengeance juices flowing and makes it all better or.....something, something? Machismo in war gets innocent folks kill, and unfortunately for
Fox and the warmongers, Obama actually cares about minimizing innocent deaths. What a concept!

The mass media is LYING about the true threat of terrorism to America, and whole bunchs else if anyone has yet to take notice. The MSM is not a reliable source of information, they are a lost cause in the long run. They have spread terrorist propaganda with glee for months and months, daily, and even now are reluctant to stop helping terrorists with recruiting. Meanwhile they are shocked to learn ISIL recruitment is going way better than Kiev recruitment...duh...what if Kiev had propaganda recruitment tapes played endlessly and with almost a reluctant admiration, day after day for months on end all around the world, big shout out to unblockable American websites. Kiev would be overwhelmed with recruits instead of scrounging around for a new battalion.

The mass media helps create the problem, then reports on the problem but not a fucking word about how THEY helped create the mess. Sort of like Iraq. That criminal act of journalism got them 12 years of Fear Media..it was their greatest victory over truth.

True con men and charlatans and totally quite useless for information, the only purpose of mass media news is as a vehicle for corporations to brainwash folks to eating pink slime for the stomach and then gorging on more for the mind. Then they push a fix for the predictsble consequences by selling you more pink slime in the form of prescription drugs.

To corporations YOU are the pink slime.

So Obama was right on about yet another thing, the ridiculous fear mongering of the mass media, in yet another speech or interview that ignores the mass media...the one thing the fascists do not and will never dominate is the social media news.

Though they are working on it by trying to kill net neutrality. There is that they can hope for, they are a dying industry, traditional mass packaged news, and they know it.

Thank you for the post.

[Enthusiast]

2. Maybe we should stop sowing disorder.

[jakeXT]

3. That would be to easy/nt

[CJCRANE]

4. $6 trillion spent on the terror war.

Imagine the infrastructure we could have built and the people we could have helped with that.