Thanks to no-drama Obama, American leadership is gone
A girl stands near the rubble of damaged buildings in al-Rai town in the northern Aleppo countryside. (Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)
By Richard Cohen Opinion writer December 26
If Dec. 7, 1941, is the day that Franklin D. Roosevelt said “will live in infamy,” then Dec. 20, 2016, has got to be a close second. No Americans died that day as they did at Pearl Harbor, but the American Century, as Time magazine founder Henry Luce called it, came to a crashing end. Turkey, Iran and Russia met in Moscow to settle matters in the Middle East. The United States wasn’t even asked to the meeting.
Winston Churchill said in 1942 that he had not become Great Britain’s “First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Nonetheless, by the end of the 1940s, much of the empire was gone. Churchill was an unapologetic colonialist, but he was up against liberation movements of all kinds, not to mention the antipathy of the United States to imperialist ambitions — in short, history itself. Churchill had a marvelous way with words, and greatness accompanied him like a shadow, but in certain ways he was a 19th-century man wandering, confounded, in the 20th.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/thanks-to-no-drama-obama-american-leadership-is-gone/2016/12/26/672481e8-cb9c-11e6-a747-d03044780a02_story.html?utm_term=.cec6419d606e
