Back in December 2008, in an interview with Time's Richard Stengel, Obama set for himself what struck me as a "modest and ambitious agenda" to make a significant beginning on several long-term challenges. I posited in early 2012 that he'd done reasonably well by his own yardstick.
In an interview airing on NPR today, Obama set himself an ambitious set of benchmarks in a narrower range: not foreign policy per se, but the legal and ethical framework in which foreign policy -- and military action -- is formed and executed. Here's the agenda:
In an interview airing on NPR today, Obama set himself an ambitious set of benchmarks in a narrower range: not foreign policy per se, but the legal and ethical framework in which foreign policy -- and military action -- is formed and executed. Here's the agenda:
On his foreign policy goals before leaving office:
"I'm going to keep on pushing because I want to make sure that when I turn the keys over to the next president, that they have the ability, that he or she has the capacity to — to make some decisions with a relatively clean slate.
"Closing Guantanamo is one. Making sure that we have the right legal architecture for how we conduct counterterrorism and that there's greater transparency, as I discussed today, that's another.
