Red Lines, Bad Rhetoric, and Sensible Caution

George Will clearly despises Obama, but he likes one thing about the President's policies: his reluctance to get dragged into Syria's civil war.

Those who have the courage of Obama’s convictions should praise his policy as an escape from the delusional ambition that the United States can and should lead everywhere.

What Will wants is a modest foreign policy, one compatible with a smaller government, lower taxes, and less rhetoric about American greatness:

The argument about what, if anything, the United States should do about developments — at once appalling and opaque — in Syria is just the latest flaring of a controversy that can be said to have been kindled in 1990 when Jeane Kirkpatrick urged the United States to resume its life as a “normal nation.” . . . In an article written after the Berlin Wall fell and before Iraq invaded Kuwait and the United States prepared to reverse this aggression, Kirkpatrick wrote: “With a return to ‘normal’ times, we can again become a normal nation. . . . It is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status.”  One of those benefits is that those who make U.S. foreign policy can scrub from their vocabularies the word “unacceptable,” which usually denotes something America actually must accept.

Exactly. The biggest danger America faces, I would say, is that we will be dragged into a war somewhere by our habit of declaring all sorts of things unacceptable. We are much less endangered by an Iranian nuclear bomb than we are by our repeated statements that we will do "whatever is necessary" to prevent them from getting one. How could Iran having the bomb hurt us more than a war with Iran would? I am not happy that Syria's government is using chemical  weapons, but it makes absolutely no difference at all to US interests, and I am not even certain it makes much difference to the people of Syria, who after all are already caught in the middle of an awful war.