Feckless tyrant indeed

In a column in today’s Washington Post, Dana Milbank sarcastically accuses Republicans of being inconsistent when they condemn President Obama for being a tyrant at home while being a feckless weakling abroad:

President Obama is such a weak strongman. What’s more, he is a feeble dictator and a timid tyrant. That, at any rate, is Republicans’ critique of him. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Obama’s critics pivoted seamlessly from complaining about his overreach to fretting that he is being too cautious. Call it Operation Oxymoron. … In theory, it is possible for Obama to rule domestic politics with an iron fist and yet play the 98-pound weakling in foreign affairs. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense that one person would vacillate between those two extremes. A better explanation is Obama’s critics are so convinced that he is wrong about everything that they haven’t paused to consider the consistency of their accusations.

Milbank misses the point entirely. President Obama’s foreign policy is so weak precisely because he tries to make government do too much at home.

Just last week, Secretary of Defense Hagel announced cuts to the defense budget that would return the American military forces to pre-WWII levels. As the New York Times reports:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel plans to shrink the United States Army to its smallest force since before the World War II buildup and eliminate an entire class of Air Force attack jets in a new spending proposal that officials describe as the first Pentagon budget to aggressively push the military off the war footing adopted after the terror attacks of 2001. The proposal, released on Monday, takes into account the fiscal reality of government austerity and the political reality of a president who pledged to end two costly and exhausting land wars. A result, the officials argue, will be a military capable of defeating any adversary, but too small for protracted foreign occupations. [emphasis added]

As Victor Hansen so eloquently wrote in his column today, there is a direct relationship between the fact that Obama has run the highest deficits of any President in American history and our inability to maintain our armed forces at a level adequate to deter aggression:

[Then] came the serial $1 trillion annual deficits, the surge in borrowing for redistributionist payouts, the monetary expansion and zero-interest rates, and finally the vast cuts in the military budget, all of which fleshed out the caricature of a newly isolationist and self-indulgent America.

Yes, President Obama is weak abroad precisely because of his overreach at home. The ideal chief executive is one who projects American strength abroad while leaving the private sector at home alone so that it can maximize its economic potential within the constraints of law. Obama is the exact antithesis of this, constantly meddling in and enfeebling the private sector and extending the soft totalitarianism of government involvement in everything at home. The inescapable outcome is an economy so paralyzed by uncertainty and a country overwhelmed with so much debt that it is no longer able to support the projection of US strength abroad.