THE NEW REPUBLIC

BY LEON WIESELTIER

APRIL 23, 2014

Yeah, let’s talk about that.” The president wished to change the subject. At a press conference the other day he was being interrogated about Ukraine when a reporter asked a question about health care. Obama was delighted. As the excellent Peter Baker reported in The New York Times, “Mr. Obama seems intent on not letting Russia dominate his presidency.” This is not the first time the president has attempted to resist such intrusions upon his idea of how the world ought to be. He has been trying to escape the Middle East for years and “pivot” to Asia, as if the United States can ever not be almost everywhere, leading and influencing, supporting or opposing, in one fashion or another. On the eve of the president’s trip to Asia, Susan Rice remarked that “increasingly [we] see our top priorities as tied to Asia, whether it’s accessing new markets or promoting exports or protecting our security interests and promoting our core values.” What is this strange choice, this retiring either / or calculation? Only small powers think this way. Can the United States ever have “top priorities” only in one place, even if it is a place as big as Asia? Are our “security interests” not also broached by the failure of the Syrian state, or our “core values” not also invoked by its slaughter without end?

The tiresome futurism of Obama, his dogmatic views about what this ritualistically ballyhooed century will be like and what it will not be like, are only a part of what lowers his vision. The bigger problem is that the president feels inconvenienced by history. It refuses to follow his program for it. It regularly exasperates him and regularly disappoints him. It flows when he wants it to ebb and it ebbs when he wants it flow. Like Mr. Incredible, the president is flummoxed that the world won’t stay saved, or agree to be saved at all. After all, he came to save it. And so the world has only itself to blame if Obama is sick of it and going home.

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