Traditionally, presidents facing opposition at home go abroad to find policy and political success.\u00a0 Basically, if you can\u2019t beat them, play with someone else.\u00a0 It\u2019s an especially useful move in the latter part of a president\u2019s second term, when lame duck status settles in and speculation about a successor mounts.<\/p>\n
Perhaps we\u2019re seeing that now with one-term President Barack Obama.\u00a0 One thing is missing, however, from the script: a foreign policy success.<\/p>\n
So far, the president\u2019s 10 day Asian trip has been a disaster.\u00a0 It started with a badly handled mis-impression that 34 warships costing $200 million a day<\/a> were escorting the president to India.\u00a0 (They weren\u2019t.)\u00a0 Then his staff was embarrassed by press handler<\/a>s working for the Indian government. \u00a0Now, he\u2019s failing to secure a crucial free trade deal with South Korea <\/a>while being ostracized at the G-20 meeting<\/a> for his fiscal and monetary policies.<\/p>\n All this may make him more likely to be defeated in his reelection campaign, but it is a terrible projection of powerlessness to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Traditionally, presidents facing opposition at home go abroad to find policy and political success.\u00a0 Basically, if you can\u2019t beat them, play with someone else.\u00a0 It\u2019s an especially useful move in the latter part of a president\u2019s second term, when lame duck status settles in and speculation about a successor mounts. Perhaps we\u2019re seeing that now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,2077,1661,154,2078,2076,2075,1221,1299],"class_list":["post-7751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-barack-obama","tag-fiscal-policy","tag-foreign-affairs","tag-free-trade","tag-g-20","tag-india","tag-lame-duck","tag-monetary-policy","tag-south-korea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7751","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\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7751"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7753,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7751\/revisions\/7753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}