Joy-Ann Reid’s Jan. 10 column, Neocons can exit, stage right, had many criticisms of the neocons while lauding the administration’s foreign policy. She offers no solution other than “stay out of it.” Trying to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, she says, is “spoiling for a new war.” Her solution — let Iran go nuclear.

She calls Obama’s approach to the Arab Spring “quiet power.” That approach has given us a Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Egypt, 50,000 dead in Syria and a Libya where we were so quiet that they killed our ambassador and three other Americans. She reminds us that the real problem in the Mideast is Israel’s refusal to accept a two-state solution, but forgets the numerous times Israel offered the Palestinian Authority 98 percent of the West Bank.

Leave a vacuum of power and watch it be filled by radicals! That is a lesson neither she nor Chuck Hagel seems to have learned.

Edwin Farber, Miami