Change from Bush to Obama administration has barely been noticeable in foreign affairs. The same internationalist foreign policy Establishment practices have prevailed which include failing to guard US interests-Angelo Codevilla, Oct. 2011, 'The Lost Decade'

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The Muslim Brotherhood and Wahhabi message to the Muslim world "indicts America, among other things, for being weak. And indeed, ever since the 1970s U.S. policy had responded to acts of war and terrorism from the Muslim world by absolving the regimes for their subjects' actions....In foreign affairs, the change from the Bush to the Obama Administrations was barely noticeable."...

Oct. 2011 article:

10/20/2011, "The Lost Decade," [2001-2011] Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont Institute

(subhead) "Whatever It Takes"
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"The common denominator of our ruling class's domestic and international strategy in the post-9/11 decade is its determination to double its bet on already failed policies. This self-referential mindset is the root cause of America's decade of loss. The New York rescue worker's shout to President Bush to do "whatever it takes" summed up the American people's priorities: rid the world of the kind of people who trammel our way of life so that we can get back to living it. Congress' authorization for the use of force echoed that mandate. But as the ruling class set about "doing something" in response to the attacks, it started from the premise that the American people are ignorant and hardly worth listening to. Hence there was no need to depart from the ideas and policies with which the Establishment had identified itself....
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Understanding the problem correctly is prerequisite for doing no harm, and maybe some good. Because the Bush Administration took CIA director George Tenet's snap judgment that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible "game, set, and match" for 9/11 as a warrant for identifying them with America's terrorist problem in general, it failed to ask the classic headwaters question: what is the problem? Had it done so, it might have noticed that the 9/11 hijackers were part of a wave of deadly disrespect for America that had been growing throughout the Muslim world—and not just there—for a generation. Had the Bush team focused on the realities that fed growing images of America as "the weak horse" (to use Osama bin Laden's words), they would have had to consider who were the major contributors to that disrespect, what they and their predecessors had done to incur it, and then to decide what actions would restore it. 
That would have pointed to the Middle East's regimes, and to our ruling class' relationship with them, as the problem's ultimate source.
 
The rulers of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority had run (and continue to run) educational and media systems that demonize America. Under all of them, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Wahhabi sect spread that message in religious terms to Muslims in the West as well as at home. That message indicts America, among other things, for being weak. And indeed, ever since the 1970s U.S. policy had responded to acts of war and terrorism from the Muslim world by absolving the regimes for their subjects' actions. 
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For example, when Yasser Arafat's PLO murdered U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, our government continued building friendly relations with Arafat, and romancing the Saudi regime that was financing him. Since then the U.S. government has given $2.5 billion to the PLO. Part of the reason was unwarranted hope, part was fear, and part was the fact that many influential Americans were making money in the Arab world....

(parag. 4) Victories validate the winners and what they stand for. Defeats usher in competitors waiting in the wings....When John F. Kennedy's old-line liberals lost the Vietnam War, their discredit empowered Democratic and Republican successors who embodied an America more collectivist at home and more timid abroad. Such changes, though big, are evolutionary because they simply bring to the fore people and ways that had been gestating within the Establishment....

(parag. 6) America's current ruling class, the people who lost the War on Terror, monopolizes the upper reaches of American public life, the ranks of those who make foreign and domestic policy, including the leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties. It is more or less homogeneous socially and intellectually. In foreign affairs, the change from the Bush to the Obama administration was barely noticeable. In domestic matters, the differences are more quantitative than qualitative. Dissent from the ruling class is rife among the American people, but occurs mostly on the sidelines of our politics. If there is to be a reversal of the ongoing defeats, both foreign and domestic, that have discredited contemporary America's bipartisan mainstream, heretofore marginal people will have to generate it, applying ideas and practices recalled from America's successful past....

(parag. 8) U.S. policy has made things worse because the liberal internationalists, realists, and neoconservatives who make up America's foreign policy Establishment have all assumed that Americans should undertake the impossible task of changing such basic facts, rather than confining themselves to the difficult but vital work of guarding U.S. interests against them. For the Establishment, 9/11 meant opportunities to press for doing more of what they had always tried to do....

(parag. 9) Our ruling class justified its ever-larger role in America's domestic life by redefining war as a never-ending struggle against unspecified enemies for abstract objectives."...



 

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