Friday, October 25, 2013
The Obama Foreign Policy Death Spiral
As the current Obamacare roll-out debacle shows, yet again, in Obama we have a president with the sneering arrogance found in Shelley's Ozymandias; the aloof cluelessness of Marie Antoinette; and the interpersonal skills, leadership abilities, managerial talents, and willingness to accept responsibility of Moe Howard.
For these and many more reasons, President Obama, America's first "mixed race" president (yawn), should have passed into history as a curiosity, a footnote alongside President Cleveland's two non-consecutive terms, Taft's huge custom-built bathtub, Harding's love child, and Carter's battle to the death with a drowning rabbit. Instead, however, this junior senator from Illinois, the man with no discernible background of achievement, has become the most destructive president in American history. The amount of damage, much of it perhaps permanent, he and "his" team have done to the economy, to individual liberty, to people's trust in government, and to our nation's international standing is incalculable. Disaster, fiasco, catastrophe, debacle, I give up, no thesaurus contains enough synonyms to capture the all-around horridness of this anti-American, anti-West presidential misadministration.
He and "his team," along with the low information non-thinking Menckenite Boobus who support them, bring to mind the words of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats,
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Today's topic for depression is foreign policy and the Middle East. I have written a great deal about this misadministration's foreign policy, and am too down to repeat it all. A few highlights will suffice. Here and here, for example, you can find general looks at our foreign policy under Obama, and, see my argument that no real leadership on foreign policy exists at either State--be it Clinton or Kerry--or, of course, at the White House. This misadministration simply does not care about America's core overseas interests. It quite happily threw away our hard-fought victory in Iraq, and is doing the same in Afghanistan.
The Obamistas care about foreign policy only when the consequences of their foreign policy ineptitude threaten to become domestic issues. Then, for example, we see them groveling to the Saudis, begging them not to reduce their oil production. The President, a sad little man, throws out careless words about "red lines" in Syria and then spends months and months trying to back away from those words, hoping against hope that somebody somewhere will either save him or take the blame. As Shakespeare notes in Hamlet, "For tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his owne petar." Along comes Russia's Putin, a bright, tough, KGB veteran who can smell weakness and lack of conviction miles away. Putin cooks up a peace in our time scheme that will defuse the petard built by and now threatening the hapless American president, and, at the same time, purely coincidentally, save a major Russian ally, Syria's Assad, and, oh yes, this too, restore Russia as a major player in the region. Putin's goal to have Russia back in the game is made all the easier by Obama's grotesque mishandling of Egypt, as I wrote in "Pyramid Scheme," where the US president made it clear that he will not stand by allies and, in fact, supports their mortal foes--in Egypt's case the Muslim Brotherhood, who also happen to hate us beyond all words.
As I stated last August,
We are firmly in the grip of an appeaser, perhaps even worse. Other countries have begun to see that quite clearly.
In the Middle East, we have shown great weakness in the face of an Islamist totalitarian onslaught, and, in fact, many of our statements on Egypt appear to favor the murdering totalitarians of the Muslim Brotherhood. Thanks to Obama, regardless of what happens in Egypt--and I suspect the Egyptian military will hang on--the US will lose. Egypt's leaders, not wishing to repeat the Daladier experience, will drift away from us. Already we see the Saudis and others in the Gulf stepping in; don't rule out a move by Russia, as well, as our ineptness in Egypt and Syria provides Moscow wonderful opportunities to reestablish its influence in the region.
We begin to see press reports of how miffed, puzzled, and angry the Saudis have become with this feckless man in the White House (here and here, for example). Before going on, let me state that I hold no brief for the Saudis. They have a despicable regime that engages in the export of terrorists and terrorist ideology. Saudi oil money has fueled the emergence of radical Islam as a major player on the world stage. They are our allies only to the extent that they will not allow terrorists to operate inside the Kingdom; have a deep and abiding fear of the Iranians for religious, economic, and geopolitical reasons; and buy a lot of US military gear.
I have long favored declaring our energy independence from the Saudis and the rest of the Middle East and support fracking (here and here, for example). The problem with what is happening now, however, is that the "break-up" should be on our terms, not those of the Saudi Royals. We have a president who makes an enormous to-do about the Sunni anti-Assad resistance in Syria, promises the Saudis help in supporting that resistance, and then blithely walks away. He ostensibly draws a bright "red line" when it comes to Iranian nukes, and then can't wait to talk to the new Iranian ruler on the phone and later announce, in essence, that sanctions will end and nothing will be done about Iranian nukes. He offends the Saudis, in fact, to their way of thinking, he presents them an existential threat to their survival. At the same time he fights to prevent fracking in the US, to hamper energy trade with our friends in Canada, and in many other ways--e.g., coal policy--seeks to sabotage our achieving energy independence, thereby giving the Saudis, whom he has spurned, a weapon to use against us. The irony is that the Saudis will find that their best "friend" in the region is none other than--surprise!--Israel, another US ally feeling very alone and vulnerable now thanks to the madness in the White House. Don't be shocked to hear of an increasing rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, with the US left on the sidelines prattling on about the Palestinians (Note to Obama and other fretting liberals: The Saudis don't give a camel's behind about the Palestinians; they know it's all for show and all a fraud).
The Obama misadministration is leaving us an exceedingly bitter legacy of mediocrity, despair, and weakness both at home and abroad
