While the spinners parse President Obama’s speech to the UN General Assembly according to the foreign policy clichés of the moment, it’s at least interesting to wonder if any US president can effect any change in foreign affairs that is more than symbolic, or alter the ideologies of the nation’s military and intelligence agencies or change their behavior. I had planned to write something about this, but Gary Wills has written something more authoritative than anything I could have said, in the New York Review of Books.

“A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire’s secrets,” Wills writes.

He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

This perhaps explains why President Obama’s campaign promises to dismantle criminal enterprises within the national defense establishment are likely to remain unfulfilled. Read the entire Wills essay here.

I’m now wondering if the new direction that those of us who ardently supported the President when he ran for office hoped for was ever more than a pipe dream that ended when it was found that AIG and certain banking institutions were “too big to fail.” It now appears that the banking industry with its rightist ideology will be too big for government to reign in, though that really means that there is so much interdependence between the interests and power bases of Wall Street bankers and those of key legislators that serious regulation of capitalist excess is impossible. And it now appears that certain cartels, the medical-industrial complex and the national defense cartel, with their rightist ideologies, have become so powerful that they cannot be successfully opposed.

The Republican party may be in disarray, but the ideological right is not only alive and well but also very much in control.