January 20, 2016--What's Playing in Somalia and On Reunion Island?

I love my Netflix.

I know there is current controversy about their ratings--the company is coy about them, which suggests they are not as high as advertised. The concern about the truth is not academic or about the truth itself but about Netflix's valuation--how much it is worth and how justifiable is its current lofty stock price.

I don't care about that except that I do have an investor's interest in the so-called FANG stocks. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. I do not at this point in my life believe in owning that many shares of individual companies, preferring broad-based securities funds, but I do own a decent amount of Amazon stock, am thinking about buying more, and am considering making an equivalent investment in Netflix.

After all, boldly last week, the CEO of Netflix announced that they are making their streaming service available in 190 large and small countries from China to Somalia.

And just yesterday Netflix announced that they are signing up surprising numbers of subscribers in many out-of-the-way places.

Now people from Madagascar to Reunion Island can catch Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards.

"They must have pretty good Internet connections," CEO Reed Hastings joked the other day when he learned that the Reunion Island folks were among the first to subscribe.

Now Netflix is scrambling to dub their shows in dozens of languages to keep up with the already burgeoning demand.

I remember back in the day, when nation-buidling still seemed to some like a good idea, that the thought was that if we could help bring versions of Western democracy to underdeveloped places such as Iraq, Syria, and Libya young people especially would clamor for MTV and once they could tune in all would be well in the world.

We see now what that culturally imperialist and naive strategy has yielded. Among other things--ISIS.

Now here comes Netflix.

To some in Yemen, seeing the evil Kevin Spacey character, fictional U.S. president Francis Underwood ensconced in the White House, will feel that what they believe to be true about our actual president is in fact true.

January 26, 2015--Legacy Polishing

Back in September, Barack Obama explained why he was not planning to send American troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

He said that he was modeling his strategy after our successful efforts to partner with governments in Somalia and Yemen to go after and defeat terrorists active in both countries and, especially, in Yemen where Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular (AQAP) has its headquarters, sanctuaries, and training grounds.

Our strategy there was to have a working partnership with the countries' presidents and to use a combination of their forces and American-guided drones to defeat the terrorists who threaten us and the Western World. There would thus be no need for American boots on the ground.

On September 10th, Obama said--

This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successful pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years. It is consistent with the approach I outlined earlier this year: to use force against anyone who threatens America's core interests, but to mobilize partners whenever possible to address broader challenges to international order.

Sounds good, if true, but minimally--that was then and this is now. The this being the rapid, unexpected-to-us collapse of the Yemeni government.  President Abdu Hadi fell to the Houthi rebels at the end of last week and they have not indicated an interest in continuing any sort of partnership with the United States. Quite the opposite.

As a result AQAP terrorists must be dancing in the desert.

One might say September is a very long time ago when it comes to changes in the region. Case in point--how our intelligence agencies were caught totally unaware of ISIS's gathering threat and rapid invasion and takeover of much of eastern Syria and northern Iraq.

But listen to what Obama said just last Tuesday in his State of the Union address--

Instead of sending large ground forces overseas, we're partnering with nations from South Asia to North Africa to deny safe haven to terrorists who threaten America. In Iraq and Syria, American leadership --including our military power--is stopping ISIL's advance. Instead of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East, we are leading a broad collation, including Arab nations, to degrade and ultimately destroy this terrorist group. We're also supporting a moderate opposition in Syria that can help in this effort, and assisting people everywhere who stand up to the bankrupt ideology of violent extremism.

No mention of AQAP, though I suppose the "denying-safe-haven-to-terrorists" is an indirect reference to them. I any case, that was last Tuesday and this is six days later and again the world has changed.

I understand that this next-to-last State of the Union was an opportunity for Obama, in the face of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, to do a little understandable bragging. Especially about the freshening state of the American economy that is occurring on his watch.

And I understand that as Obama attempts to polish his legacy he does not want to be represented as a war president. By citing how our troops are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan and terrorists are in alleged retreat, he is drawing a credible contrast between himself and his preemptive-war predecessor.

He did after all win the Nobel Peace Prize preemptively, after fewer than nine months in office, in the hope and expectation that he would be a peace president.

Peace Prize or not, peace or war president aside, we need to hear the truth from Obama and the beginnings of a well-thought-out, very longterm strategy to take on the daunting foreign policy challenges we face. A legacy based on candor will sit well with historians and ultimately be better for Americans than posturing and spin.