Brent Scowcroft Center Senior Adviser Harlan Ullman writes for the Huffington Post on the results of the recent midterm elections:
Mark Twain famously exclaimed that the reports of his demise were greatly exaggerated. Last Tuesday’s elections were not precursors of the demise of the Obama administration at the hands of a newly empowered Republican-controlled Congress. Neither were they signs of a rapprochement between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Despite Senator Mitch McConnell’s preliminary offer of an olive branch to President Barack Obama, if the honeymoon is not over yet, it soon will be. The partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats almost surely will deepen over the next few months. If the president chooses to act alone on immigration during the lame duck session of Congress, a state of political war is guaranteed.
What can the White House do with the new Congressional majority when the 2016 elections will dominate much of the next two years’ politics and the Republican Congress will pass a Tsunami of legislation, much or some of which the President will find unacceptable? The answer lies in foreign policy. President Obama has some dramatic opportunities if he is bold and courageous enough to pursue them.