The reductionism of foreign policy events spanning decades and contintents to "kill brown people" is incredibly frustrating because it boils down complex issues into a singular point that isn't very useful for discussing any of the individual circumstances or issues.
Fair enough.
The only way American presidents don't kill anybody is if America retreats entirely from the world stage. At which time they'd be replaced by China and Russia.
It's impossible to live in a world where this doesn't happen, even indirectly - Trump is supporting the murder of journalists by covering for Saudi Arabia
I don't want to be too hard on Obama for multiple reasons, one of them being that he was working against unprecedented obstruction and another being that I feel in retrospect that maybe I projected things on him that I wanted him to be because he was the first PoC to reach that office. Obama was able to get as far as he did by being as milquetoast as possible but it's like some of us wanted him to be this black superhero that he never wanted to be.
This conversation is so frustrating because... it just feels like everyone, myself included, is just kind of running the same script depending on where in the overton window we want to be? "I'm an idealist, I refuse to accept that a president trying hard couldn't create a perfect foreign policy, if he wanted to." "I'm a realist, and I recognize the constraints on the president's power both domestic and foreign make a perfect foreign policy an impossibility." Which is all well and good when you're discussing generalities, but I feel like we'd be making very similar arguments, made by the exact same people, whether the Overton Window was trying to figure out "Should we conquer Venezuela and steal their oil?" or "Should we make aerial bombardment illegal as a matter of international law?" And it becomes much more about the relative positions than where the Overton Window should be in the first place.
I don't mean to pick on you, Greg NYC3, but I keep seeing people bringing up obstructionists in regards to the drone issue, and I can't figure out why. A President's power is nearly unlimited to shape foreign policy as he wants, both constitutionally and by custom. If you're trying to make a hard 180 degree turn like Trump in dismantling the entire liberal international order, yeah, the generals and the civil service are going to start putting up a fight, but otherwise? You're golden. I don't blame Obama for delivering an Obamacare without a public option, or for failing to get cap and trade passed, for precisely this reason. But drones? Not a single one of those fires without the President's say-so, delegated or otherwise.
So, here's my pitch for why drones are different: Obama was the first leader in world history to have access to them. To the extent that people think there are domestic and bureaucratic restraints on how the President can act here, there was no existing drone doctrine he would have to overthrow to implement something. There were no entrenched interests relying on government contracts for drone production. He was writing on a blank slate. And no one, in the history of the world, is ever going to have that blank slate again. Precedent matters, and norms matter, even in the anarchic field of international relations. You never get a second chance to be the first to establish norms around the usage of new and unique weapons.
What precedents did Obama set? That national sovereignty did not matter, in ordering drone strikes. That the nation ordering drone strikes need not provide a formal declaration of war, or even let anyone domestically know that these strikes were occurring. That the global hegemon should be able to kill the citizens of weaker countries indiscriminately. And that not even citizenship in the global hegemon protected someone from being killed, or entitled them to due process protections.
It is hard to imagine a drone policy more maximally terrible than the one Barack Obama adopted. Perhaps an international agreement banning their use in anything but declared war is impractical, though I think we still should have attempted it. But it is not hard to make Obama's policy, on the margins, more humane and more just. Obama did not seek a compromise between two poles, he ran so far to the right that he's practically out of bounds. The effects of his carelessness will long outlive him, and probably outlive any of us. In the short term, it means more bloodshed in the middle east. In the long term, it makes whoever comes after America as the global hegemon more dangerous.
Pardon the florid language, but murder robots are being dispatched to neutral countries, slaughtering a whole bunch of people, and we claim victory because everyone within a certain distance from our target is defined to be an enemy combatant. Drones would be a ridiculous reductio ad absurdum argument against Bush's cowboy diplomacy if they weren't very real.
