You won’t find it in his memoir or any of the oodles of words written about him during the campaign, but this reporter has discovered a strikingly naive article Barack Obama wrote about the anti-war movement as a Columbia University senior in 1983.
If Obama still has this sensibility, he could be poised to take American foreign policy sharply to the left, notwithstanding the centrist foreign policy team he has assembled. Moreover, since Obama didn’t recognize the Soviet menace during the Cold War and blamed the possibility of war entirely on the United States, there’s good reason to think that today he could lack the moral clarity needed to fight radical Islam.
The article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” published by the Columbia magazine Sundial, is a wholesale endorsement of all sorts of leftist claptrap fashionable at the time.
Obama deems the Reagan era defense buildup a “distorted priority” and “dead end track.” Writing in the midst of the Cold War, Obama was nevertheless oblivious to the threat the Soviet Union then posed to the United States. Indeed, he does not even mention the Soviet Union in his article. Instead, Obama blames — you guessed it — America and its “twisted” world view for the “growing threat of war.”
If only Americans would change their thinking, he argues, the threat would subside. Give re-education a chance.
