Barack Obama, an interview from Fareed Zakaria GPS, rerun today:
And one of the things that I want to do, if I have the honor of being president, is to try to bring back the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan — but also characterized to a large degree the first President Bush, with people like Scowcroft and Powell and Baker, who I think had a fairly clear-eyed view of how the world works, and recognized that it is always in our interests to engage, to listen, to build alliances, to understand what our interests are, and to be fierce in protecting those interests — but to make sure that we understand it’s very difficult for us to, as powerful as we are, to deal with all these issues by ourselves.
We need to show leadership through consensus and through pulling people together wherever we can. There are going to be times where we have to act unilaterally to protect our interests. And I always reserve the right to do that, should I be commander-in-chief. But…
We have already noted that famous statement of Karl Marx, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” In fact, the actual quote is from the opening sentences of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), to wit:
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
We would note, with regard to Sen. Obama’s desire to resurrect, “the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan…” that unlike President Truman, a future President Obama administration will not have:
a current account surplus,
a trade surplus,
a balanced federal budget,
an American voter with a net saving account, and,
an economy which is the unrivaled industrial power of the global economy.
He will actually be inheriting from the Moron – a man more like Mr. Truman, than Barack on his worst day – a nation as dependent on subsidies from Russia and China, as were Britain, France and Germany on the United States in Truman’s day.
The irony of this fact has, we hope, not escaped you.
The Second Time as Farce…
We have already noted that famous statement of Karl Marx, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” In fact, the actual quote is from the opening sentences of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), to wit:
We would note, with regard to Sen. Obama’s desire to resurrect, “the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan…” that unlike President Truman, a future President Obama administration will not have:
He will actually be inheriting from the Moron – a man more like Mr. Truman, than Barack on his worst day – a nation as dependent on subsidies from Russia and China, as were Britain, France and Germany on the United States in Truman’s day.
The irony of this fact has, we hope, not escaped you.
This entry was posted on August 24, 2008 at 10:24 pm and is filed under General Comment, political-economy with tags Barack Obama, budget deficit, cold war, CURRENT ACCOUNT DEFICIT, full spectrum dominance, NSC-68, TRADE DEFICIT, Truman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.