Who is the smartest man in the room?

History

I'm certainly not the smartest. Just spend about ten minutes with my first wife and you'll be convinced of that. However, I am smart enough to learn from my mistakes. Just spend about ten minutes with my current wife and you'll see what I mean. So, I must be smart. But a truly smart man learns from the mistakes of others.

You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself." - Sam Levenson 

Now some say that President Obama is the smartest man in the room. Well, if that is so, why hasn't he learned from the mistakes of others? Look at how he handles strife in the world and you'll see what I mean

There has always been strife in the world. No leader has succeeded in eliminating it. However, some have handled it better than others and we don't have to look back very far to witness numerous successes and failures in dealing with it. You would think that a leader such as the President of the United States would study them to employ the best or, at least, avoid repeating the failures. Sadly this President seems to have a penchant for repeating failures much like a prize fighter who leans into a left hook. At the very least, he would create new failures. Why does he have to repeat the old ones?

Both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower (plenty of blame for both parties here) employed the strategy of containment in dealing with the Soviets and the spread of communism, this far and no further. And, while they held the line at the Iron Curtain in Europe, communism seeped through the cracks into Asia, Africa, and even parts of the Western Hemisphere.

With containment clearly failing, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon went with detente. What is detente? Think of it as adversaries getting along like two rattlesnakes trapped in the same burlap bag. Detente was supplemented with the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Yes, it would be madness for the principal actors to confront each other directly. Their combined nuclear arsenals were sufficient to destroy the world several times over. Still detente failed because the nascent combatants simply employed client states who engaged in limited hostilities to decide the issues, and strife continued.

It's difficult to fault President Carter. Neither containment nor detente were practiced during his Administration. Actually, it's difficult to name his policy for dealing with strife inasmuch as he never actually appeared to deal with it. He was too busy micromanaging his Administration to be aware of it. That's not to say that he didn't contribute to strife in the world. Indeed, his contribution to the fall of the Shah of Iran led directly to the problems in the Middle East that we're dealing with today. Still, he's proud of his efforts to rid the world of a most unchristian ruler. However, in all honesty, his Administration didn't even present a speed bump to strife. In its final days, the forces of strife reigned.

That brings us to confrontation. Fear of confrontation led the Iranians to release the American hostages within the first hours of Ronald Reagan's Administration. Apparently, the Iranians read the messages that the American press had used in a vain attempt to block Reagan's election. They must have believed that he was the cowboy president as editors derisively named Reagan. When Muammar Gaddafi tested Reagan's mettle by blowing up a nightclub in Germany frequented by American servicemen, Reagan ordered immediate air strikes on every residence where the Libyan tyrant might be found and he was never heard from again during the Reagan Administration. Reagan was the first to name the Soviets as the Evil Empire and acknowledge that we were at war with them. Despite his other missteps, it was his willingness to confront enemies and engage them that is the prime factor in their downfall and a brief span of relief from the stresses of strife in the world.

Thus, Barack Obama had three examples to employ – containment, detente, confrontation – or create a policy of his own. He tried containment, his lines in the sand. He tried detente – negotiating with the Iranians – and promises us peace in our time. He eschews confrontation like the plague. 

We are left to wonder. If President Obama is the smartest man in the room, is he pursuing failure. If he isn't, are we going to survive his failures?