To call Obama a ‘liberal technocrat’ when he is most assuredly an unimaginative Neo-Liberal, and to utter this maladroit sentence: ‘When Vladimir Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, John Kerry, the outgoing secretary of state, said: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in a 19th-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped up pretext.” As Kerry is still Sec. of State, leads the incredulous reader to face the fact that the political world, that Mr. Luce describes in his essay, is not the political world that the rest of us are perceiving. 

Obama could not be called a ‘Realist’ nor an ‘Idealist’ but a president who received a Nobel Peace Prize on October 9, 2009, and then, through his evolving policies, made a mockery of that bestowal. Luce’s encomium to Obama exhibits the same strengths of that of his Peace Prize: it exists in the realm of fiction, but in this instance, the writer places himself as the central civic actor, declaring before the end of Obama’s term, how readers are obliged to view that eight years. Historians, writers, thinkers and citizens  will render that judgement only after the fact, not almost two months prior to the end of Obama’s second term!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/18faf0a6-b251-11e6-a37c-f4a01f1b0fa1