{"id":12631,"date":"2014-01-17T11:09:36","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T11:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=12631"},"modified":"2014-01-17T11:09:36","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T11:09:36","slug":"obama-has-no-sense-of-what-he-wants-to-do-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=12631","title":{"rendered":"‘Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"obamaoh\"<\/a>Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on the history of war, says that the US president\u2019s strategic failures in Afghanistan and Syria have crippled America\u2019s position in the world.<\/p>\n

President Obama is \u201cchronically incapable\u201d of military strategy and falls far short of his predecessor George W. Bush, according to one of Britain\u2019s most senior military advisors.<\/p>\n

Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the Defense Staff, told The Daily Beast that the United States and Britain were guilty of total strategic failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama\u2019s attempts to intervene on behalf of the Syrian rebels \u201chas left them in a far worse position than they were before.\u201d<\/p>\n

The extraordinary critique by a leading advisor to the United States\u2019 closest military ally comes days after Obama was undermined by the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who questioned the President\u2019s foreign policy decisions and claimed he was deeply suspicious of the military.<\/p>\n

Strachan, a current member of the Chief of the Defense Staff\u2019s Strategic Advisory Panel, cited the \u201ccrazy\u201d handling of the Syrian crisis as the most egregious example of a fundamental collapse in military planning that began in the aftermath of 9\/11. \u201cIf anything it\u2019s gone backwards instead of forwards, Obama seems to be almost chronically incapable of doing this. Bush may have had totally fanciful political objectives in terms of trying to fight a global War on Terror, which was inherently astrategic, but at least he had a clear sense of what he wanted to do in the world. Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Strachan\u2019s book The Direction of War, which will be published next month, examines the failure of modern political leaders to use strategy to predict and account for the implications of military action. Oxford University\u2019s Professor of the History of War says the lessons learned at the end of the 20th century proved to be damaging at the start of the next. \u201cUsing war did deliver. The wars were pretty short, the Falklands, First Gulf War, Kosovo, so people lulled themselves into an expectation that war was simply a continuation of policy and that it was successful. But it hasn\u2019t been since 9\/11,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on the history of war, says that the US president\u2019s strategic failures in Afghanistan and Syria have crippled America\u2019s position in the world. President Obama is \u201cchronically incapable\u201d of military strategy and falls far short of his predecessor George W. Bush, according to one of Britain\u2019s most senior military advisors. … Continue reading “‘Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world’”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12632,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10,123],"tags":[8031,2355,2521,8032,2471,6058,8030,8033],"class_list":["post-12631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","category-world","tag-advisor-to-the-chief-of-the-defense-staff","tag-afghanistan","tag-falklands","tag-global-war-on-terror","tag-iraq","tag-kosovo","tag-sir-hew-strachan","tag-the-direction-of-war"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/obamaoh.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12631"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12633,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12631\/revisions\/12633"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}