The Obamas' Farewell Tour to Eight Years of Neo-Con Foreign Policy

The mainstream commentariat can nitpick all it wants about what President Barack Obama achieved or didn't achieve from the G-20 summit and NATO meetings in Europe last week but the far bigger story is how the First Couple's visit marked the total repudiation of the neo-conservative foreign policy project. It wasn't long ago when Donald Rumsfeld was crowing about "New Europe" and Republicans in the House forced the Capitol's cafeteria to serve "Freedom Fries" instead of French fries. Talk radio blowhards were even staging events across the country where "patriotic" Americans dumped French wine into the nearest gutter. And these embarrassing antics were because the Bushies were outraged that most of our traditional allies thought invading Iraq was a bad idea.

======

The beauty of seeing the President and First Lady treated like rock stars and royalty in Europe is that they are liberals who represent the exact opposite of what Bush and the neo-cons offered the world. Barack and Michelle Obama are connecting to the world's people in a way that Bush and Cheney never could (and never wished to). Not only are the Obamas young, hip, black, cosmopolitan, and urban, they care about the issues most people in the world care about. At the town hall gathering in Strasbourg, President Obama spoke about how only through working together through multilateral action can we begin to find solutions to the financial crisis, international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, and AIDS and other epidemics. The Obamas' first trip abroad has been a stunning symbolic success for the United States. Obama's the only politician in the world today who's popular. We should take pride that our institutions were responsive enough in 2008 to give us the opportunity to replace one of the most reviled presidents in history with one who could become one of the most revered.

LinkHere