Richard Cohen: A Superpower -- and a President -- With Declining Clout
[Richard Cohen is a columnist for the Washington Post.]
Early this month Barack Obama went down to Louisiana to eyeball the possible damage from BP's exploded oil rig, keep the cleanup crews on their toes -- no version of "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" from him -- and show the Gulf Coast states and the rest of the nation his concern. On May 3 , The Post's Web site played the story precisely where it belonged -- entombed in the middle of the page. In its placement, it said the president of the United States did not, in this case, matter all that much.
Everyone knew that Obama was merely showing that he was not George W. Bush. He was not going to ignore a calamity, especially one affecting New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. On the other hand, we all knew that he could not reverse the winds or cork the spill. In fact, he could do precious little except show that he cared....
In the Middle East, nothing Obama has done has made much of a difference. In Europe, the euro teeters. As critical as this currency is, it is far less important than the concept of European integration upon which it is based. We tend to forget that Europe is the home office of awful wars -- twice in the last century we got involved -- and if you include Russia as part of Europe, as some Russians insist, then we have to count the Cold War, too. As for Russia, it shrugs off American complaints and moves progressively backward -- not a European democracy, just something else....
In 1987, Paul Kennedy published "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers." It created great buzz because, among other things, it predicted the relative and absolute decline of the United States. Kennedy attributed this to military "overstretch" and deficit spending -- problems that have since gone from the theoretical to the acute. In a sense, we have more wars than we have cash....
Read entire article at WaPo
Early this month Barack Obama went down to Louisiana to eyeball the possible damage from BP's exploded oil rig, keep the cleanup crews on their toes -- no version of "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" from him -- and show the Gulf Coast states and the rest of the nation his concern. On May 3 , The Post's Web site played the story precisely where it belonged -- entombed in the middle of the page. In its placement, it said the president of the United States did not, in this case, matter all that much.
Everyone knew that Obama was merely showing that he was not George W. Bush. He was not going to ignore a calamity, especially one affecting New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. On the other hand, we all knew that he could not reverse the winds or cork the spill. In fact, he could do precious little except show that he cared....
In the Middle East, nothing Obama has done has made much of a difference. In Europe, the euro teeters. As critical as this currency is, it is far less important than the concept of European integration upon which it is based. We tend to forget that Europe is the home office of awful wars -- twice in the last century we got involved -- and if you include Russia as part of Europe, as some Russians insist, then we have to count the Cold War, too. As for Russia, it shrugs off American complaints and moves progressively backward -- not a European democracy, just something else....
In 1987, Paul Kennedy published "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers." It created great buzz because, among other things, it predicted the relative and absolute decline of the United States. Kennedy attributed this to military "overstretch" and deficit spending -- problems that have since gone from the theoretical to the acute. In a sense, we have more wars than we have cash....