O and Trump: Tweedle dee, Tweedle dum

The massacre in San Bernardino by an Islamist husband-and-wife terror team forces us to recognize, once again, that the United States has to choose between isolationism and internationalism in its foreign policy. 

Put another way, it’s a choice between disengaging from the world’s most febrile regions, in the hope that doing so will put us out of harm’s way and rein in our “imperial” instincts, or actively engaging on our own terms, in the expectation that we can effectively counter rogue regimes and terrorist groups.

This is where we get to a disturbing similarity between President Barack Obama and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. The reason? Both of them approach foreign policy from the vantage point of isolationism.

Take Obama first. A rare Oval Office address to the nation in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting manifestly failed to say anything we hadn’t heard before—and never mind that the president stood before the camera with a 64-point disapproval rating on his handling of terrorism. After giving us a perfunctory lecture about Islamic State being the only threat in the Middle East (a complete falsehood), and after assuring us that a political solution to the Syrian civil war is still possible so long as we work with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Obama turned to the subject that really animates him: gun control.

Taken as a whole, the speech was an artless attempt to turn a debate about international policy into one about domestic issues. There was no explanation for the current predicament of the Middle East. Indeed, Iran, which has fueled the rise of Islamic State through its backing of the Bashar al-Assad regime, wasn’t even mentioned. Instead, we were told that preventing the denizens of a dubious “no fly” list from purchasing guns was the chief priority for our national security.