Obviously, you shouldn’t conduct foreign policy by reading polls, but the remarkable thing is that it wouldn’t be popular anyway. I can tell this because the public pretty strongly disapproves of President Obama’s foreign policy even as what he has actually done in most cases has been the most popular position. What people are really objecting to is the results of their own desires.
For example, in Iraq, I don’t think anyone is pleased with the situation that has developed there, but most people wanted us to leave Iraq and not leave any residual forces. Most people don’t want to sacrifice American lives and treasure in Iraq and ultimately don’t much care what happens there so long as it doesn’t have any effect here at home. To a somewhat lesser extent, the same is true of Afghanistan. It’s true of Libya, Syria and Ukraine, too.
Maybe the big boys have interests to protect in the region, and maybe the oil supply needs to be protected, but the Average Joe doesn’t want any part of that hornet’s nest. For the most part, the president has resisted efforts to get more involved militarily in the region, and he’s wriggled out of numerous traps or opted for minimalist approaches where some action seemed necessary.
If people don’t like to watch a sectarian civil war develop across several borders, they can blame Bush/Cheney for kicking the hornet’s nest in the first place. If President Obama can’t fix the problem, he can at least keep us at arm’s length and protect American lives and resources. This is what the American people say they want, and yet they are still unhappy.
But the alternative would be for President Obama to falsely claim that he has a solution and then to squander lives and resources in a vain and doomed effort to fix a problem that he can not solve. That would not improve his poll numbers.
So, we get a lot of people saying “just do something,” even though they can’t articulate anything he can do that would either work or be supported by the public.
And, yes, this will only be Obama’s problem for a little while longer. Soon, it will be the Republicans who are running for president’s problem. They have no idea what to do, and they will discover that no course of action is popular.
