MOSCOW, October 9 (RIA Novosti) - As President Obama attempts to navigate through several global crisis, many of his own making, many of the main critics of his efforts are urging a far more dangerous course.
On foreign policy in particular, many of the President’s opponents who previously praised the leadership style of Vladimir Putin are pushing for an even more aggressive foreign policy.
Two Republicans, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and former Missouri Senator James Talent, who is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation where he specializes in military readiness, took to CNN on October 6 to attack Obama’s “failed leadership” on America’s defense issues.
Their solution, fully laid out in “Rebuilding the American Defense Consensus”, published by a new organization chaired by Governor Jindal, includes increasing defense spending to 4%, which will allow the US army to support NATO and a strong sanctions regime in order “to defer future Russian adventurism.”
With Jindal, a likely 2016 presidential candidate and Talent, a military analyst at a top right-wing think tank working together, it is likely their ideas will gain traction among other Republican candidates when the presidential race picks up in the next few months. It is likely that every Republican candidate will attack Obama and call for higher defense spending.
Outside of official campaigns, rightwing media figures like Bill O’Reilly of Fox News will continue to use their national broadcast to attack the President for being weak while pushing for even more aggressive military responses.
On March 4th, O’Reilly told his viewers that, “in a way, you gotta hand it to Putin. He knows the West is weak.” On September 22, O’Reilly once again declared that Obama is weak and “without guts to raise an anti-terror force.”
Rather than weakness, O’Reilly wants Obama to use American and NATO funding for an elite, 25,000 person, highly trained strike force, able to attack any “terrorists” on short notice with limited repercussions. It is unclear if he imagines this force being used against Russia.
However, On September 3, O’Reilly lumped ISIS and Putin together when calling Obama “passive in the face of grave threats,” suggesting arming the Ukrainian Army, moving missiles to NATO countries, and having American banks refuse to accept credit card receipts from Russia.
The constant refrain from the Right that the President is weak is one of the factors contributing to an approval rating mired in the low 40s. In a recent poll from FoxNews, 74% of respondents said the President was “not tough enough” on radical Muslim terrorists. These results can and likely will be used to justify increased military aggression in order to be seen as “tough” against America’s “enemies”, identified generally as anything from ISIS to Putin.
There are certainly enough reasons to be concerned with Obama’s policies. Presidential candidates from both parties will spend the next two years finding every item they could and would do differently. However, when criticism that Obama is not acting with enough force spreads, it creates a much more dangerous and aggressive American political environment, which will have serious military consequences.
Daniel Zubov
Center for International Journalism and Research, “Rossiya Segodnya”
October 9, 2014
