Obama’s Love of Cake

Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article on the development of Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy is, as always, full of interestig stuff even if, perhaps unavoidably, I suspect it depends a little too heavily upon the Slaughter-Power approach. Nevertheless, Ryan gets to the heart of Obama’s presidency – or at least the style of it – here:

Obama’s instinct was to try to have it both ways. He wanted to position the United States on the side of the protesters: it’s always a good idea, politically, to support brave young men and women risking their lives for freedom, especially when their opponent is an eighty-two-year-old dictator with Swiss bank accounts. Some of Obama’s White House aides regretted having stood idly by while the Iranian regime brutally suppressed the Green Revolution; Egypt offered a second chance. Nonetheless, Obama wanted to assure other autocratic allies that the U.S. did not hastily abandon its friends, and he feared that the uprising could spin out of control.