May 28 - Obama's New Foreign Policy Vision; Has Obama's "Team of Rivals" Hamstrung His Foreign Policy?

We begin with the major foreign policy speech the president gave at West Point where he outlined a new U.S. foreign policy based on collective action with allies at the same time castigating his opponents in Congress for denying climate change and refusing to sign the U.N. maritime treaty and chiding his critics for their attitude that “working through international institutions, or respecting international law, is a sign of weakness.” Veteran British diplomat and senior intelligence official Alastair Crooke, the Director and Founder of Conflicts Forum based in Beirut, who was the adviser on Middle East issues to Javier Solana, the EU Foreign Policy Chief, joins us to discuss how Obama managed to navigate around the contradiction that the American public is fed up with intervention, but likes being the world’s leading superpower.

Part 2

Then we continue our examination of Obama’s new foreign policy vision with Roger Morris, who served on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under presidents Johnson and Nixon, whose latest book is “Kindred Rivals: America, Russia and their Failed Ideals”. We discuss Alistair Crooke’s contention that Obama’s foreign policy has been hamstrung from the outset by the president’s notion of emulating Abe Lincoln’s “team of rivals” which has led to the sabotage of Obama’s foreign policy on the inside by neocons like Victoria Nuland and hawks like Hillary Clinton, leaving Obama to work in secret with Vladimir Putin and Iran’s new leader so that the hawks and cold warriors who dominate our foreign policy establishment and the press don’t jump on him. We also examine the contradiction that while Senator John McCain and the conservative opposition see negotiation as weakness and bombing as strength, the American people are largely on Obama’s side, even if they don’t support him.