COMMENTARY
Accepting the World as It Is
by Noah Rothman
February 2, 2016

In hindsight, the fragile naiveté that typified President Barack Obama’s approach to geopolitics when he first came to office seems like even more of a ponderous folly than it was at the time. “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game,” the newly inaugurated president declared before a 2009 gathering of the United Nations General Assembly. “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.  No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.  No balance of power among nations will hold.” This was only so much vanity masquerading as high-minded savoir-faire…The idea that the world’s revisionist powers and stateless bad actors could be corralled and managed, so long as the manager had the requisite intellect, was nothing short of embarrassing hubris. But after nearly a decade of war, we wanted to believe. Today, however, this self-deception is inexcusable. READ MORE