Politics
John Collins
Engagement can be seen as a tactic insofar as it helps us accomplish discrete goals, but after eight years of Bush’s Mideast bungling, vigorous engagement itself must be our foreign policy goal. Prior to a policy of concerted and constant engagement, we will be in the dark as to what our policy ought to be, as it will necessarily have to be directed towards positions and shaped by factors that we don’t currently understand. Seeking this understanding, though, is an active process that offers one significant agency and influence. Because our policy is rooted in our evolving understanding, engagement offers us major potential to deeply influence policy long before it’s made. Obama understands the potential to shape policy processes before they begin, and so has made engagement not just a policy, but the policy of the United States.
Politics
Kevin Hilke
Obama’s retrospectively vindicated opposition to dumb war in the face of supposedly airtight evidence for launching it has proven a victory not just for Obama, but for the legitimacy of ambiguity itself as a space for positive thinking in the making of serious decisions by individuals and societies. With the discrediting of certitude undergirded by the hyperspecific comes the complementary embrace of an ineluctably abstract, indefinable hope—a hope we have espoused, often reluctantly, because the sober and steady hand of the man who has become its global symbol checks its pesky quixotism.
Politics
Kevin Hilke
It’s likely that many within the Bush Administration—especially now, when the effects of its philosophical and practical failings, and Americans’ readiness to be rid of it, are so palpably felt—have undergone, are undergoing, or will undergo variations on that experience: losing faith in a leader who not only isn’t as positively transformative as he appeared, but is dishonest and disingenuous to boot. But McClellan’s must be the one of the worst. For four years, he was paid to be the cipher of Bush’s duplicity. He wasn’t just deceived; he was deceived into deceiving, and all while deceiving himself that nothing of the sort was afoot, trusting in the long-compromised yet somehow still compelling integrity of the men and women he served.
