Rarely does one find such a textbook example of impenetrable cluelessness as Nile Gardiner's, he of "the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation":
[Obama's West Point address] was delivered by a president seemingly obsessed with image and public perception, rather than the long-term strength of America's foreign and security policy.
Gardiner concludes with the neocon's characteristic, indeed obligatory tribute to the image-obsessed Reagan administration--"confident, assertive U.S. leadership" devoted to "building America's defenses, squaring up to America's foes, and standing with friends and allies"--but his lead evidence as to Obama's sagging leadership is this:
[H]is short-sighted decision to abandon Afghanistan in 2016, with the Taliban lurking in the wings to retake power, following in the footsteps of his withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011. Two-and-a-half years after the last American soldiers left Baghdad, the al Qaeda flag now flies over the city of Fallujah, a terrible precedent for developments in Afghanistan once the Stars and Stripes are lowered in Kabul.
Only one conclusion can be reasonably drawn from Gardiner's stirring cri de coeur: Because sectarian and tribal divides have violently bedeviled these regions for centuries, the United States must insert itself likely for centuries more. There, and elsewhere. That is the unwritten prescription of the Gardiner camp: an "assertive U.S. leadership" that would drain the United States into an exhausted crater of self-defeat.
And that, in turn, is the neocon's long-term vision of American foreign policy, which in practice would be a blindingly short one. That the devout McCain and impressionable Romney never got the reins of America's firepower is a blessing for which we can be eternally grateful.