America's Post-America President: John Bolton on Obama's Next Three Years

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton takes a look at Barack Obama's agenda once he shakes-off the remnants of the Bush-era. Bolton's assessment arrives at three critical Obama-characteristics that will shape his policy over the next three years. Here's a snippet of one. Read the entire article at Commentary Magazine.

Third, Obama’s vision is embedded in a carapace of naive internationalism, a very comfortable fit when national security is neither that interesting nor that important.

Obama is the first president since December 7, 1941, to espouse a determinedly unassertive global role for the United States, one ironically verging on an essentially neo-isolationist view of America.

Obama’s December 1 announcement of troop increases in Afghanistan is not to the contrary, since he proclaimed the beginning of withdrawal in virtually the same breath. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is the very paradigm of legacy issues Obama does not want to confront. Failures such as his Middle East peace process and dealing with Iran and North Korea have simply led to resignation and inattention.

However, Obama’s is not your grandfather’s isolationism. He focuses not on America’s virtues but on why it is ordinary (thus explaining why, as I have written elsewhere, he is firmly “post-American”).¹ It is America’s ordinariness that should enjoin it from imposing its will upon other nations. Obama is our first sitting president to express this sentiment.

Our President is disengaged with the national security and sovereignty that has allowed us to be not only powerful, but benevolent. The formula for the making of America, as laid out in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, is in the process of being reformulated. In the end, Bolton says:

...the United States is exceptional and will not melt into any larger or global union; it will simply become less able to protect itself and its constitutional decision-making system. That is clearly where our first post-American president’s policies will take us.

The term "post-American President" is a tidy term, describing Barack Obama's contempt for our Constitution, contempt for our work ethic, and desire to rule rather than to lead - no matter the cost or corruption to the body-Congress in the process.