Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Obama the Untested

Dispatch May 4, 2009 by Robert D. Kaplan

A look ahead to the crises—from Russian power plays to Israeli military strikes—that could really show us what the president is made of.

The American media has just released an avalanche of reports assessing President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office. Ignore it all. It doesn’t matter. The revealing part of his presidency hasn’t begun yet. At about this point in his presidency, George W. Bush had, with the help of his secretary of state, Colin Powell, just won the release of the crew of a U.S. spy plane from China, leading the world media elite to declare Bush a pragmatic president in foreign affairs, and Powell his most important advisor. As for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, it was said that he would be gone by summer—a short-serving and utterly forgettable secretary of defense. 9/11, of course, still lay in the future.

read more
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905u/kaplan-obama-100-days

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