By Bruce Walker, American Thinker

Obama needs a new foreign policy strategy

President Obama seems to be grappling with an approach to safely resolve the grave international problems of Iran and of North Korea.  He is floundering for the right tactics when what he needs is the right strategy.  As my friend Herb Meyer, who worked closely with Reagan in winning the Cold War, reminds us, Reagan’s strategy was straightforward:  ”How about this?  We win.  They lose.”  Barry Goldwater put in much the same during the 1960s, when his Cold War strategy was summarized in his 1963 book title Why Not Victory?

Obama, like many Leftists, confuses national security tactics with national security strategy.  Our strategy, after July 4, 1776, was to win independence.  Members of the Continental Congress could visit with representatives of the Crown all they wished, but the strategy of the conflict – not the tactics – changed and decided the course of the war.  Winston Churchill, in the darkest days of the Second World War, said that “Our policy is victory.  Victory at all costs.”

Obama needs to learn a bit about statesmanship from Churchill, Washington, and Reagan.  These men all had a defined goal and they each knew why reaching that goal was vital to mankind.  When politicians lack a strategic plan, we end up with messes like Vietnam, Korea, or the Treaty of Versailles.  Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon could never figure out whether they wanted to defeat North Vietnam – a relatively simple task which our four mothballed Iowa class battleships could having largely done alone – or to leave South Vietnam to the communists.

Wilson, the only president as naïve as our current president, promised the peoples of Europe sovereignty, and then allowed France and Britain to create precisely the sort of polyglot nations like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which made some sort of European war almost certain and a Carthaginian peace on Germany which made it very hard for noble Germans to win elections in Weimar Germany.