{"id":2634,"date":"2009-12-11T15:47:58","date_gmt":"2009-12-11T20:47:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=2634"},"modified":"2009-12-11T19:09:36","modified_gmt":"2009-12-12T00:09:36","slug":"professor-obama-goes-back-to-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/2634\/professor-obama-goes-back-to-school\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Obama Goes Back to School"},"content":{"rendered":"

Foreign Policy Initiative’s Abe Greenwald does an excellent riff on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptace speech today on National Review’s website<\/a>. The upshot: Greenwald wonders whether Obama’s stark articulation of evil’s presence in the world (and its impact on international affairs) shows a president who’s starting to rethink some of the first principles of his foreign policy.<\/p>\n

Greenwald sees some promising signs, but still wonders whether Obama can ever fully turn the corner. In one bravura passage:<\/p>\n

“Irving Kristol said, almost too memorably, ‘A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.’ With that definition in mind, an eminent national-security personage put this perfectly phrased query to me over the summer: ‘Is Obama too arrogant to get mugged by reality?'”<\/p>\n

“An excellent question. What the president calls his \u201cphilosophy of persistence\u201d looks increasingly like the vice of conceit. The new White House imperiousness explains Obama\u2019s inability to offer full-throated praise for the Iraq War \u2014 an undertaking he staunchly opposed. It also explains his devotion to de-fanging Iran through the voodoo of his personal allure (and to his correspondent obtuseness on Iran\u2019s democrats).”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today’s best piece on foreign policy (apart from this one<\/a>). Read it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Foreign Policy Initiative’s Abe Greenwald does an excellent riff on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptace speech today on National Review’s website. The upshot: Greenwald wonders whether Obama’s stark articulation of evil’s presence in the world (and its impact on international affairs) shows a president who’s starting to rethink some of the first principles of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[138,143,216,130,274,128,264],"class_list":["post-2634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-afghanistan","tag-barack-obama","tag-foreign-policy","tag-iran","tag-iraq","tag-neoconservatism","tag-nobel-peace-prize"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2634"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2641,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2634\/revisions\/2641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}