Patterico's Pontifications

2/7/2015

The President Asking For “Strategic Patience”

Filed under: General — Dana @ 8:45 am



[guest post by Dana]

Although required to update the National Security Strategy every year, President Obama just sent his first update to Congress since 2010. The document seems permeated with a “let’s wait and see” restraint. What we are waiting for is unclear.

In his introduction, the president discusses the need for “strategic patience”:

America leads from a position of strength. But, this does not mean we can or should attempt to dictate the trajectory of all unfolding events around the world. As powerful as we are and will remain, our resources and influence are not infinite,” Obama writes in the introduction to the 35-page policy document. “The challenges we face require strategic patience and persistence.”

Some of the administration’s focal points for the next two years:

Russia: The strategy calls for continued diplomatic and economic pressure on Russia for its incursion into Ukraine, working “in lockstep with our European allies.” At the same time, the Obama administration will “keep the door open to greater collaboration with Russia in areas of common interests, should it choose a different path.”

Islamic State: The United States will “prioritize collective action” to address the threat from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and from related groups. The strategy document reiterates the position that Iraq and its Middle Eastern neighbors have to take a lead role in combating ISIL on the ground, although the United States will continue to deploy its “unique military capabilities.”

North Korea: The United States is “modernizing our alliances” with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines to counter North Korean provocation.

Western Africa: The Ebola epidemic shows the need to focus on health issues as part of a national security strategy, the report said.

China: “The United States welcomes the rise of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous China,” the policy document says. “While there will be competition, we reject the inevitability of confrontation.”

And regarding global security, the president asserts climate change and terrorism as twin threats of equal urgency:

In addition to acting decisively to defeat direct threats, we will focus on building the capacity of others to prevent the causes and consequences of conflict to include countering extreme and dangerous ideologies. Keeping nuclear materials from terrorists and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons remains a high priority, as does mobilizing the international community to meet the urgent challenges posed by climate change and infectious disease.

And a word to the wise, TNR cautions that whoever becomes the GOP nominee should really heed the president’s words in the National Security Strategy update that climate change is “an urgent and growing threat to our national security”, because if the nominee doesn’t, Hillary! will wipe the floor with him:

Republicans remain unconvinced that climate change is caused by humans or a serious threat to the plan, so they’re not likely to accept that climate change is a national security issue, too. But in 2016, when the GOP nominee elaborates his or her (OK, his) plans for military preparedness, he’s going to find this issue hard to avoid. He’ll need to at least acknowledge the challenges that rising seas and temperatures pose to U.S. interests abroad, including military infrastructure and operations.

Otherwise he’ll be struck dumb when Hillary Clinton makes it a campaign issue: Last fall, the former secretary of state said climate change is “the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world.”

I’m not convinced that climate change will really matter too much as we witness our “strategic patience” allowing an increased presence and advancement of ISIS throughout the region and worse, beyond.

–Dana

53 Responses to “The President Asking For “Strategic Patience””

  1. Hello.

    Dana (8e74ce)

  2. many innocent trees, were sacrificed for that document, alliances with Russia would involved Syria and Iran, and overall discouragement of democratic movements, leaving the Iranian bomb out of the picture,

    narciso (ee1f88)

  3. “Strategic Patience” = gone golfin’

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  4. Nah! The Republican candidate in 2016 should emphasize legalization of marijuana, more transsexuals in the military and a free iPhone with every Obamacare enrollment.

    And, oh yes. She should be a black, lesbian, unwed mother with a Hispanic surname, who slopped hogs and wear bread bags over her one pair of shoes when walking three miles to school growing up in Idaho. Big tent, you know.

    nk (dbc370)

  5. *wore*

    nk (dbc370)

  6. strategic patience for the jew-nuking iranians

    fierce urgency on climate change

    america the pitiful
    god bless your little heart
    you’re such a joke
    you’re weak and broke
    a cowardwhore at heart

    happyfeet (831175)

  7. I don’t think so, Pikachu, however the passive aggressive campaign of the last two bouts won’t solve the problem?

    narciso (ee1f88)

  8. I agree with happyfeet. NSFS* http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fifty-shades-grey-lubricant-claimed-770959

    *Not safe for sanity

    nk (dbc370)

  9. And the least said about Jupiter Descending the better.

    narciso (ee1f88)

  10. we will see Mr. narciso

    but failmerica was facing quite the challenge simply recovering from the incompetence inflicted on her in her last bout with bushfilth

    now on top of that the poor little thing’s been viciously raped by the incompetence and malice of food stamp

    someone get the wretched lil thing a tissue

    and maybe a scooby doo band aid

    happyfeet (831175)

  11. it really was a ridiculous performance, that more should have walked out on,

    narciso (ee1f88)

  12. I wish everyone would have had the chance to live in the innocent 50’s and early 60’s.
    Heck of a Country it used to be.

    mg (31009b)

  13. it’s curious to compare back then, Eisenhower after Korea, certainly wanted to curtail direct involvement, preferring covert action in the third world.

    narciso (ee1f88)

  14. The realities of Obola’s behindfirst leadership:

    Aid to Ukraine: Trauma counseling and blankets for civilians who manage to survive Russian artillery barrages. Presumably to keep them marginally functional for duty in the coming worker’s paradise.

    Armed Forces Leadership: Fire on civilians within the U. S.? Yes Sir! Three bags full! Climate Change biggest threat in the future? Yes Sir! Three bags full, Sir! Downsize Military making up for shortages with 4th and 5th overseas tours for National Guard reservists? Yes Sir! Three Bags Full Sir!

    Meanwhile, Russia is deploying modern T-80 tanks with armor that is untouchable by Ukraine anti-tank weapons and Russian electronic warfare activities have neutralized communications and targeting by the Ukrainian forces.

    Climate Change continues to be the Piltdown Man of the modern era, only with horrendous political consequences instead of just embarrassed stutters at faculty club teas.

    For those who might wish to see what satellite temperature measurements of the bottom 6 to 10 km of the atmosphere might say about the actual heating of earth, there is this website maintained by Dr. Roy Spencer. These temperatures are an average to the tropospheric temperature over the entire earth as measured by instruments that are each independently calibrated by “on-board precision redundant platinum resistance thermometers.” No plus or minus 2C or 3C, as are so many of the cherry picked surface measurements used by the cultists.

    bobathome (f208b6)

  15. President Behind.

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  16. I just don’t think the purported “Age of Aquarius” is working out too well. 🙂

    The Age of Aquarius in the U.S. is associated with the hippies of the 1960s and ’70s, and now with the New Age movement. In both cases, the arrival of the Aquarian age has been associated with harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding. And that brings us to the 1967 smash-hit musical Hair, with its opening song Aquarius, by a musical group called the 5th Dimension. The song opened with the lines:

    When the moon is in the Seventh House
    And Jupiter aligns with Mars
    Then peace will guide the planets
    And love will steer the stars
    This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius

    elissa (3cfe6f)

  17. Obama would have us believe that the Islam some of us have seen for the last 50 years is not Islam. He’s a Reality Denier.

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  18. nk@9–Tania Warchol seems a little gullible to me. For her own safety she must never be allowed near a used car lot or a Time Share sales luncheon event.

    elissa (3cfe6f)

  19. Given that Obola and Rice are so fixated on their behinds, the question is whether 1 tissue is really enough. And when providing “military aid” to the Ukrainians do our quartermaster provide one tissue per day per refugee, or are they expected to share?

    bobathome (f208b6)

  20. just a tad, elissa

    well Sheryl crow will be the quartermaster so what do you think?

    narciso (ee1f88)

  21. On a morning from a Stallone movie
    In a country where they turn back time
    You go strolling through the crowd like Barack Obama
    Contemplating tee time
    It comes out of the sky like a lightning bolt
    Burns thru bones, fries the brain
    Don’t bother asking for explanations
    They’ll just tell you that it came
    In the year of the moonbat

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  22. we’ve had six years of strategic patience, and what do we have to show for it?

    narciso (ee1f88)

  23. The question the media used to ask was of the form: “What did you know, and when did you know it?” The presumption being that there was something embarrassing or criminal that the subject knew.

    The question historians will ponder about this regime is: “What didn’t you not know, and when did you know you didn’t know it?” The presumption being that these good-hearted, brilliant socialists must have been totally blindsided by reality. Which of course, excuses them from all responsibility and lays the intellectual groundwork for doing the whole thing over again, but this time much harder.

    bobathome (f208b6)

  24. They ask us why
    He’s just a sh*t-brained guy
    He’s sh*t-brained noon and nighty night night
    Thoughts are a fright
    Sh*t-brained high and low
    Don’t ask him why
    Cuz he don’t know
    It’s not for lack of school
    Like some droolin’ fool
    People
    Gimme a Prez with brains
    A functioning, working brain
    Thinking, blinking
    Streaming, thought-filled, no frills
    Gimme a stand-up guy
    not some academic
    Here baby, there mama
    Everywhere daddy daddy
    Brains, brains, brains, brains, brains
    Stand up, man-up
    Kill them Mooselim Devils
    Right now

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  25. Hillary, Obama-o, Biden-lingus, Holder-asty
    Father, why do these names sound so nasty?
    Liberation, can be fun
    join the holy orgy KamaSutra everyone!

    felipe (56556d)

  26. Princess is a braying jackass: What in the world can we fault Richard the Lionhearted with for sojourning to the Holy Land to butcher goatherds taken to raping Christian wimmens and slaughtering their chillens, burning down churches, exacting ransoms, aborting pilgrimages and carelessly sh*tting in their pants?

    Off the reprobate, enough!

    DNF (79b098)

  27. Obama is like neville chamberlin who did not want to go war with hitler ;but hitler forced him into it. Just as isis has force obama back into iraq where does not want to go.

    nuke mecca (61c44c)

  28. The RNC really needs to thank TNR for analyzing the last election to find Steyer’s recipe for success.

    Ibidem (9fc0ba)

  29. Sometime last summer, someone here commented that done properly it should take six months or so to wipe out ISIS, while Obama’s plans were for doing it in three years.
    Seems to me that those work out to the same thing; three years from last summer means six months of the next president fixing everything that went wrong under Obama.

    Ibidem (9fc0ba)

  30. Strategic patience = slacker

    AZ Bob (34bb80)

  31. I’ve been out of stategic patience with prom queen since what? 2007?

    Guess I missed the rush

    Steve57 (36c0a6)

  32. Ok. 2008.

    Steve57 (36c0a6)

  33. But Frank taught me that everyone worked with 5-year plans?

    askeptic (efcf22)

  34. Neville Chamberlain cautioned strategic patience in 1938.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  35. So steelworkers and longshoremen have chosen a perfect time to demand reparations.

    Oil’s depressed price will not see our pocketbooks because of shuttered refineries.

    Low shipping rents will rebound despite a dearth of commerce as every tanker available rests fully-laden at anchor.

    QED, a 2015 down 3.2% globally will birth an even more destitute 2016 from hopelessly contorted data.

    DNF (a31090)

  36. A nifty side-story to our malaise-cum-Waterloo is the total BS of Russian econonic distress brought on by ‘sanctions’.

    The US shale oil industry is every bit as much the target as Russia’s oil production. But with the vanished petrodollar all of the latter’s contracts of delivery are in rubles and financing of exploration and extraction will be unaffected. Russian refineries, OTOH, will endure similar collapse to margins as those in the West.

    Sorting thru the horsesh*t is beyond the ken of the FBN.

    DNF (a31090)

  37. To this humble observer the most outstanding story in America today is our unity in cowering before evil, unwilling to call it out as such, let alone personify its actuality.

    A nation of predominately Darwinian failures, post-literate garden slugs.

    DNF (a31090)

  38. The new Greek government has discovered a solution to their financial problems … reparations from Germany for WWII. Greek math works this out to about $160B, or almost exactly half of the Greek debt that will soon be in default. What a coincidence! This works out to about $10,000 per person in Greece.

    The sad truth is that if Germany were to give Greece this amount, it would be squandered in a matter of months. But what a party! The profits from the carnival would likely end up right back in Germany. The wiser Greeks would have deposited their portion of the loot in Switzerland, converting the Euros into Francs, or, hang on, into gold. But we know that is a silly idea.

    There was no mention of reparations from Italy, which is curious since Italy was the country that made the decision to invade Greece in WWII. Perhaps the Greeks are saving that play for the next round of defaults. It is a wise finance minister who always has a Plan B. And there is always the Ottoman Empire if Plan B fails.

    bobathome (f208b6)

  39. 40. While the music plays the adversaries circle, pleading, taunting, hurling threats, etc.

    http://m.bbc.com/news/business-31249907

    When the music stops the markets will have the last word.

    Get ready for the reappearance of drachmas, pesetas, lira, and marks.

    DNF (beef66)

  40. 41. Its easy to read the EU propaganda remembering your trip to Athens where every restaurant double bills and accept the party line as seminal–corruption is endemic.

    But that conclusion is facile however representative.

    Why would anyone expect economic union to work with open borders with one region contributing only tourism, olives and ouzo? The euro was absurd from day one and bound to fail.

    Forcing permanent depression on Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, et al., is criminal and sufficient ground for another world war.

    DNF (beef66)

  41. 42. Merkel and Hollande reprise Kohl and Chiraq: The cipher hyperpower does not give a rip if we burn.

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-09/morgan-stanley-says-grexit-would-send-eurusd-crashing-090

    You may now panic.

    DNF (38b68f)

  42. Look for talk of German exit from its fiduciary obligations to the EU to gain the attention of Angela and company.

    DNF (38b68f)

  43. I have a hunch that Merkel, et al, are about to stab the Ukraine in the back … in order to ensure “peace”. Putin will have the last laugh?

    bobathome (f208b6)

  44. “Forcing permanent depression on Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, et al., is criminal and sufficient ground for another world war.”

    DNF – If they didn’t like the terms of the rescue money, they didn’t have to take it. Saying we weren’t serious about making economic reforms after taking the money is just bad faith.

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  45. Get ready for the reappearance of drachmas, pesetas, lira, and marks Marx.

    FIFY

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  46. It’s impossible for me to sympathize with any of the major players in Europe, be it the EU — and its overreaching, power-hungry, nanny-state bureaucracy operating out of Brussels — or the socialistic, corrupt messes of Greece, Spain, Italy, etc.

    Throw in all the pro-Sharia-law lunacy that many (if not all) these various groups have been and are being toadies to, and if the ship of Europe sinks, anchors away!

    Mark (c160ec)

  47. 45. Agreed. Fight putin wit Princess gots yer back? Not!

    46. Unquestionably a nation of 16 million can do without some of its 600K government ticks.

    All the same, this whole refinancing fiasco began seven years ago Greek public debt stood at something like 136% of GDP and unemployment approaching 20%.

    Well, unemployment has doubled and the debt burgeons. That debt is owned by EU banks and the ECB at yields above 5%, some above 10%.

    The current account deficit could be cured with a drachma at a 40% discount to the Swiss franc or a deutschmark, and 90% of the debt simply disowned.

    Everyone involved knows this.

    DNF (eb7f11)

  48. “Well, unemployment has doubled and the debt burgeons. That debt is owned by EU banks and the ECB at yields above 5%, some above 10%.”

    DNF – It’s tough to measure unemployment when so many people have either “on the books” jobs or “off the books jobs” or both, with the “off the books jobs” not contributing a dime to the national treasury. I have no sympathy for countries where fraud is a national pastime.

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  49. 50. A fair point. Evidently the new regime’s cash on hand has been restricted even further by opportunists waiting to see what transpires.

    No doubt whatever that Grexit will make life for the little people much worse for the near to medium term, upto three years.

    DNF (a505c5)

  50. Strategic patience is comprehensively equivalent with “watch me screw the pooch while ISIS cleans house in the Arab ME and iran gets the bomb and meet together in Palestine an wipe them Jooos off Dar al Islam’s Holy Ass.

    DNF (2a424b)

  51. off the books is the only way to survive for some of us.

    mg (31009b)


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