Colucci on Obama’s foreign policy strategies

Lamont Colucci, associate professor and chair of politics and government and interim director of the Center for Politics and the People at Ripon College, wrote an opinion piece criticizing President Obama’s foreign policy positions that was published by U.S. News & World Report. Click here to read the full article.

Calling it “a foreign policy vacuum,” Colucci asserts that Obama’s State of the Union address showed that the president has nothing but disdain for international affairs. “It reminds the electorate of the abject and complete scorn the president and his administration has for international affairs and foreign policy,” Colucci wrote.

He details what he sees as Obama’s foreign policy failures: not a single notion of how this administration sees American strategy, let alone how to achieve it; his inability to direct and command; the president’s policy with Iran of a “deal at any price could literally be the tipping point to set the entire region on fire”; and that the Department of Defense was largely absent from the State of the Union address.

“The tired rhetoric of the administration is finally wearing thin,” Colucci writes. “They can’t bring themselves to use terms like Islamic extremism, enemy combatant or even terrorism properly. They are justifying negotiating with the Taliban because they are suddenly an insurgency, but somehow the Islamic State group is not? The real question is not if the Taliban or the Islamic State group are terrorists or insurgents. They are both. Nature abhors a vacuum, international relations won’t suffer it, and the American electorate won’t forgive it.”