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Mark Landler’s Followers (8)
Mark Landler
* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
“Still, there was a basic contradiction at the heart of Obama’s decision to intervene that contributed to this unraveling. His focus on a front-end solution—consciously trying to avoid the nation-building missteps of George W. Bush—foreclosed any meaningful American role in the postwar stabilization or reconstruction of Libya. There would be no peacekeepers, trainers, or advisers. That distinguished Libya from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also from Bosnia, Kosovo, and virtually every other American intervention since World War II. The absence of boots on the ground deprived the United States of leverage in dealing with Libya’s new leaders. While these leaders squabbled among themselves in Tripoli, the radical jihadi groups helped themselves to assault rifles and machine guns from Colonel Qaddafi’s ransacked armories. As in Iraq half a decade earlier, the lack of security proved to be Libya’s undoing: The militias poured in to fill the vacuum left by Qaddafi. What had been hailed by many as a “model intervention” turned out to be a blueprint for chaos.”
― Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power
― Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power
“Clinton recognized the challenge for the United States. Over a long lunch with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia in Washington in March 2009, she asked him for advice on dealing with China. “How do you deal toughly with your banker?” Clinton said, according to a State Department cable released in December 2010 by WikiLeaks. Rudd, describing himself as a “brutal realist on China,” told Clinton that the United States should adopt a policy of “multilateral engagement with bilateral vigor”—a polite way of saying “Make friends with China’s neighbors and get tough on China.” Whether Rudd knew it or not, he was describing the outlines of a policy already taking shape in the State Department. “China badly misread the United States, believing we were in a downward spiraling decline,” said Kurt Campbell, one of the principal architects of that new approach. “On that first trip, they did not treat Obama as well as they should have.”
― Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power
― Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power
“At issue was not just whether the United States properly protected its diplomats in a dangerous country, but also whether it had adequately planned for a peaceful postconflict society. Libya raised the most basic questions about the limits of liberal interventionism in the age of Obama. The paramount issue, in other words, was not what Clinton did or didn’t do in the days after Benghazi; it was what she and Obama did or didn’t do in the weeks and months after the president, at the urging of his secretary of state, fired Tomahawks into Tripoli. —”
― Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power
― Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power
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