US Politics Feature: "Who was the Best Foreign Policy President?" --- Scott Lucas with CNN

Ronald Reagan amid the Iran-Contra scandal, 1986 (Photo: Dennis Cook/AP)

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On Thursday, CNN's Global Public Square posted the responses of eight historians and analysts to the question, "Who Was the Best Foreign Policy President?" A majority named Franklin D. Roosevelt, but there was also a high level of support for the first George Bush (no one named the second one). One commentator named Ronald Reagan, a response matched by Thomas Jefferson and my friend David Ryan's selection of Jimmy Carter.

Then, at the end, I spoiled the party....

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History Lesson: From the Big Muddy of Vietnam to the Quagmire of Afghanistan (Ryan)

The US was stuck in the “Big Muddy” for years, but it finds itself just as stuck today in Central Asia, drawn in by the enemy.

Obama’s recent decisions on Afghanistan, on Yemen and on Pakistan, coupled with the baying from Congress about Iran and the ongoing Tea Party tirades paint an American system that favours the tactical and symbolic over the strategic. There is no space to consider the observations of a man like Mikhail Gorbachev; the US is condemned to remain in their "quagmires", both real and imagined.

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