Ready.Aim.Fire

Hillary Clinton’s gaffe resembles Obama’s foreign policy

Transcript:

Recently Secretary of state Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov with a lapel button she thought said ‘reset’ in Russian, a play on words about the Obama Administration’s intention to reset the US-Russian dialogue.  Unfortunately, nobody on Hillary’s staff checked the spelling. The button actually read  ’overloaded’ in Russian.  Oops.

It was a silly mistake, but nonetheless symbolic of the way the Obama Administration is approaching foreign policy:  Fire, Ready, Aim.  Driven by the ‘fierce urgency of now’ with the economy, they’re applying the same frenetic pace to foreign policy -  and charging off half cocked in a dozen different directions at once.

The one thing I learned in my years at the White House is an Administration can only focus on only a handful of crises at a time. If a President and his team try to deal with everything -  all at once – they end up focusing on none of them.  Being Commander in Chief is all about setting priorities.

No doubt U.S. relations with China are important, as are our relations with Russia, and East Asia, and South America, Europe and Africa. The chronic state of war between Israel and the Palestinians is also important. So are those prisoners at Gitmo. But none of them are as urgent as Iran’s nuclear program.

Unless something changes- very soon- Iran will be a nuclear power in the next year or so and an immediate threat to israel’s continued existence. If Israel concludes – within the next few months that the Obama Administration is unable or unwilling to stop Iran, it  will in all likelihood bomb their nuclear facilities, setting off a cascade of crises effecting region and the world.

Maybe its unfair to expect Obama to have solved the Iranian nuclear problem by now, but he should at least have started.  Because he’s running out of time.