A life insurance company is running a very revealing ad on TV these days. In the ad, people were told to put blue and yellow stickers, representing positive and negative experiences, on two walls, one of which represents the past, and the other the future. The wall for the past was a roughly even mixture of colors; the one for the future was almost completely positive.
We as a species are wired to be optimistic. We think that things in the future will be much better than the past even when experience tells us otherwise. We can’t live without hope; in fact, some of the happiest people I have known in my life have been the most self-deluded about their real condition.
So it is with foreign policy. It is tempting to look at Syria or the Iran deal, for example, and assume that a more bellicose policy would have led to better results even though we don’t have any real evidence to believe that. For example, we could have given the “moderate” rebels surface-to-air missiles to deal with Syrian air attacks, and they could ultimately have been used by terrorists to shoot down civilian airliners. If we had launched air strikes on Iran, we might have been looking at $10 per gallon gasoline. The bottom line is we don’t know for certain that these things would have happened, so we completely discount them, and compare the real problems of today with a Brigadoon that never was or would be.
Obama doesn’t get any credit for the problems that he didn’t cause by refusing to militarize our foreign policy, but he should.