by J.R. Dunn
With the ongoing collapse of Iraq, the endgame for the worst foreign policy in American history has begun.
It is no less than astonishing to glance over the foreign policy errors made by the Obama administration since 2009.
● The deliberate alienation of the UK. Thanks to direct and malicious efforts made by President Obama personally (the Churchill bust, Region 1 DVDs), the oldest and most fruitful alliance of the modern age entered into its frostiest period since the Civil War... in the midst of a civilizational conflict in which the Anglosphere comprised the sole serious opposition.
● The deliberate undermining of Israel. Again, a loyal and steady ally was cut off for no rational reason. In this case, a country to which the U.S., as the chief representative of the West, owes an unquestionable moral debt. I guess O was listening to all those Jeremiah Wright sermons after all.
● The dismissal of India. Though generally overlooked, this marks a crucial blow against a future alliance promising profound benefits. The Bush administration put particular effort into widening relations with Asia’s largest democracy. Obama allowed this to collapse, evidently as an insult directed at George W. Bush.
● The abandonment of Africa. Again, Bush did yeoman’s work in reviving American involvement in Africa, an effort that generated praise even from his political enemies. As with India, our first African-heritage president dropped this without even a second glance.
● A back of the hand to Central Europe. Both Poland (the ABM system) and the Czech Republic (Early warning and control for the same system) had the rug pulled out from under them by Obama. Not a smart way to treat our most steady allies on the continent.
● The Russian “reset,” A goofy, ill-informed, and badly-executed reversal of post Cold War policy evidently designed to assure the Russians that we feel bad about 1989 and won’t do it again. Repaid with invasions of Georgia and Ukraine.
● The North African apocalypse. Someday, somebody is going to drill down to the bottom of this episode and reveal exactly what was going on; contemporary media is too busy attacking the tea parties. It appears that this was the result of a scheme to “liberate” the Mediterranean littoral states, a mixture of U.S. allies and neutralized dictatorships, and transform them into mass democracies under the rubric of the “Arab Spring.” The “democrats” all seemed to be associates of the Moslem Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, the liberation a cataclysm that threatened to spread across the Islamic world. Obama, as is his custom, dropped all involvement and walked away. Thank Allah for the Egyptians.
● The demolition of Syria. A direct result of the “Arab Spring” strategy, the Syrian collapse piled one humiliation after another on the administration in the form of Benghazi and arms for al Qaeda. Almost unnoticed, the people of Syria are suffering a humanitarian catastrophe fully the equivalent of Rwanda and the Balkans in the 90s. Obama is handling it with same dynamism that Clinton did back then.
● The failure to back the “Green Revolution” in Iran. This is something of a mystery -- why undercut an uprising that promised to remove a active threat in the form of theocratic Iran and then two years later embark on something as foolish as the Arab Spring? Perhaps Valerie Jarrett’s future memoirs will enlighten us.
● Refusal to address the Iranian nuclear threat. See above.
● The collapse of Iraq. This is undoubtedly another case where Obama was intent on throwing away a Bush success. Fumbling the Status of Forces agreement and dropping all attempts to influence the Maliki government, the administration stood aloof while Noor al-Maliki, essentially a primitive tribal leader in a fancy suit, deliberately trashed the laboriously (not to mention bloodily) established postwar status quo. The smartest man of his epoch somehow couldn’t foresee how this was going to work out.
● The China Seas confrontation. The administration has allowed the Chinese to get away with their “blue territory” scam at direct cost to our closest allies in the region with minimal response. I guess that “swing toward the Pacific” is still in mid-motion.
● The rape of Ukraine. The sole reason Putin hasn’t seized the rest of Ukraine must be that he can’t believe what he’s being allowed to get away with. For all the reaction from the White House, he could reoccupy Ukraine, the Asian republics, Alaska, and then move on to Canada with no serious worries.
That’s a good solid dozen. We could go on, of course (Afghanistan hasn’t been mentioned yet), but this is more than enough to establish the Obama administration as the worst foreign policy presidency in the American chronicle, bar none. Madison’s fumbling his way into the War of 1812, Wilson’s schoolmarm stance toward involvement in WW I, and Harding’s refusal to take up any share of the postwar burden come as strokes of genius compared to this. If any single one of these had occurred during a previous presidency, the shrieks of disaster would have rung the vault of heaven. Together they are unparalleled. Bismarck once said, “God looks after drunks, children, and the United States of America.” The Almighty has apparently been busy in the bars and playgrounds since 2009.
Looking at the record laid out like this, it’s easy to understand the more hysterical types who insist that it’s all part of a plan, that Obama is a super Bond villain set on bringing Western civilization down in ruins. But in fact, it’s all a result of long-term leftist ideas, chief among them, in the case of foreign policy, that A) the United States is the source of the world’s ills, and B) Remove American influence and the world will soon revert to a humanist, collectivist modus vivendi.
(There’s also a third such concept at work in this case as well: the idea that women, with their practicality and compassion, would, once in charge of international relationships, soon put things is order where men have failed for millennia. This is the reason behind Obama’s hiring of Hillary Clinton, an incompetent egomaniac matched only by himself, Susan Rice, who consistently seems lost somewhere between confusion and bewilderment, and Samantha Power, whose “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine strangely disappeared once she needed to defend the Obama administration’s Syria dithering. The results speak for themselves.)
That’s the program that Obama has been carrying out. That’s the basis of “leading from behind,” the “reset,” various Springs and Dawns, and the abandonment of the UK, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, India, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The outcome has been what any high school history student could have told you: invasion, brutality, and genocide. Throughout history, the only instrument to successfully enforce peace has been the superstate: Persia, Rome, the Ottomans, Britannia, the United States of America. The dominant power must act as the dominant power or as nothing. Obama, lost in his choom gang 1970s daydreams, has made the nihilistic choice, and now millions will pay for it.
What can be done? Very little, at this point. To consider otherwise is to assume that this crew of losers -- Obama, Hagel, Rice, Power, and a cast of thousands -- can somehow undo what they set in motion through their own stupidity and self-delusion in the first place. (This is to assume that you can attract Obama’s attention without calling airstrikes against every golf course on the planet). With the coming collapse of Iraq, the avalanche is in motion and cannot be stopped. The best strategy is to ride it out and prepare to pick up the pieces.
A wise man (that being Calvin Coolidge) once stated that “if ya see ten troubles comin’ down the road, you can be sure nine will run into a ditch before they get to ya.” This is simple truth. Not all these disasters will play out completely. Some of them will cancel each other out. Others, like Russia’s return to Soviet-style aggression, are likely to be the final paroxysm before the Russians resume their journey to joining the Sumerians and the Canaanites. We need to select the most urgent and confront them first -- Iranian nuclear weapons leading this particular list. Iraq is one that should be set aside; with fracking and the accelerating switch to a natural gas economy, Iraq, to paraphrase a previously mentioned foreign policy expert, is not worth the bones of a single Nebraska infantryman. (Spare a thought for the 275 troops that O has already seen fit to toss into the cauldron.)
The rest will have to go to the wall -- and this is the truly shameful aspect. It is a superpower’s job above all to maintain order, to assure that the kettle never reaches a full boil, that the bandits and lunatics remain corralled. This is the role that the U.S. has played since WWII, not always perfectly and not always well, but better than most in the sad and terrible human record. This is the role that this country has vacated due to the actions of a man-child with the mentality of a doped-up college undergrad. Americans should be thankful that we will not be called on to pay the full price.
We will have a chance to make up for it, once the current gaggle of gibbering feminists, backwoods oafs, and Chicago hustlers are swept from office. The U.S. remains the most powerful state in history; there is no stand-in. Eventually -- and the sooner the better -- the U.S. will resume its old role, for the simple reason that nobody else can do it.
But one point must be made clear: that the current disaster is the sole property, not only of Barack Obama, but the ideology to which he is enthralled. This same state of affairs occurred once before, during the 1970s. The same exact attitude, the same contempt for U.S. power, the same neverland daydreams of endless Eloi amity and brotherhood. They were adopted in full by Jimmy Carter, who followed the prescription of abrogating U.S. influence and cutting American defense spending. The result was the fall of Ethiopia and Nicaragua, the seizure of Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe, and the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR -- in a phrase, the “falling dominoes” that the American left had laughed away a few years earlier.
But instead of laying the responsibility on Carter and his leftwing supporters, media, the academy, and the Democrats attacked Ronald Reagan in his arduous and in the end successful attempts to put things right. So the leftist mentality survived the debacle of the 70s to reemerge under Obama.
This elitist, murderous, and imbecilic ideology needs to be laid in its grave. The world stands on the verge of a new renaissance, based on incredible technological breakthroughs and a mature understanding of the human condition. The United States is the instrument to bring this about. The one element holding us back, the Western left, has under Obama put up their last dollar and watched it be snatched away. The left is bankrupt in every conceivable sense. It’s time to drag them away from the table and out of the game.
It is no less than astonishing to glance over the foreign policy errors made by the Obama administration since 2009.
● The deliberate alienation of the UK. Thanks to direct and malicious efforts made by President Obama personally (the Churchill bust, Region 1 DVDs), the oldest and most fruitful alliance of the modern age entered into its frostiest period since the Civil War... in the midst of a civilizational conflict in which the Anglosphere comprised the sole serious opposition.
● The deliberate undermining of Israel. Again, a loyal and steady ally was cut off for no rational reason. In this case, a country to which the U.S., as the chief representative of the West, owes an unquestionable moral debt. I guess O was listening to all those Jeremiah Wright sermons after all.
● The dismissal of India. Though generally overlooked, this marks a crucial blow against a future alliance promising profound benefits. The Bush administration put particular effort into widening relations with Asia’s largest democracy. Obama allowed this to collapse, evidently as an insult directed at George W. Bush.
● The abandonment of Africa. Again, Bush did yeoman’s work in reviving American involvement in Africa, an effort that generated praise even from his political enemies. As with India, our first African-heritage president dropped this without even a second glance.
● A back of the hand to Central Europe. Both Poland (the ABM system) and the Czech Republic (Early warning and control for the same system) had the rug pulled out from under them by Obama. Not a smart way to treat our most steady allies on the continent.
● The Russian “reset,” A goofy, ill-informed, and badly-executed reversal of post Cold War policy evidently designed to assure the Russians that we feel bad about 1989 and won’t do it again. Repaid with invasions of Georgia and Ukraine.
● The North African apocalypse. Someday, somebody is going to drill down to the bottom of this episode and reveal exactly what was going on; contemporary media is too busy attacking the tea parties. It appears that this was the result of a scheme to “liberate” the Mediterranean littoral states, a mixture of U.S. allies and neutralized dictatorships, and transform them into mass democracies under the rubric of the “Arab Spring.” The “democrats” all seemed to be associates of the Moslem Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, the liberation a cataclysm that threatened to spread across the Islamic world. Obama, as is his custom, dropped all involvement and walked away. Thank Allah for the Egyptians.
● The demolition of Syria. A direct result of the “Arab Spring” strategy, the Syrian collapse piled one humiliation after another on the administration in the form of Benghazi and arms for al Qaeda. Almost unnoticed, the people of Syria are suffering a humanitarian catastrophe fully the equivalent of Rwanda and the Balkans in the 90s. Obama is handling it with same dynamism that Clinton did back then.
● The failure to back the “Green Revolution” in Iran. This is something of a mystery -- why undercut an uprising that promised to remove a active threat in the form of theocratic Iran and then two years later embark on something as foolish as the Arab Spring? Perhaps Valerie Jarrett’s future memoirs will enlighten us.
● Refusal to address the Iranian nuclear threat. See above.
● The collapse of Iraq. This is undoubtedly another case where Obama was intent on throwing away a Bush success. Fumbling the Status of Forces agreement and dropping all attempts to influence the Maliki government, the administration stood aloof while Noor al-Maliki, essentially a primitive tribal leader in a fancy suit, deliberately trashed the laboriously (not to mention bloodily) established postwar status quo. The smartest man of his epoch somehow couldn’t foresee how this was going to work out.
● The China Seas confrontation. The administration has allowed the Chinese to get away with their “blue territory” scam at direct cost to our closest allies in the region with minimal response. I guess that “swing toward the Pacific” is still in mid-motion.
● The rape of Ukraine. The sole reason Putin hasn’t seized the rest of Ukraine must be that he can’t believe what he’s being allowed to get away with. For all the reaction from the White House, he could reoccupy Ukraine, the Asian republics, Alaska, and then move on to Canada with no serious worries.
That’s a good solid dozen. We could go on, of course (Afghanistan hasn’t been mentioned yet), but this is more than enough to establish the Obama administration as the worst foreign policy presidency in the American chronicle, bar none. Madison’s fumbling his way into the War of 1812, Wilson’s schoolmarm stance toward involvement in WW I, and Harding’s refusal to take up any share of the postwar burden come as strokes of genius compared to this. If any single one of these had occurred during a previous presidency, the shrieks of disaster would have rung the vault of heaven. Together they are unparalleled. Bismarck once said, “God looks after drunks, children, and the United States of America.” The Almighty has apparently been busy in the bars and playgrounds since 2009.
Looking at the record laid out like this, it’s easy to understand the more hysterical types who insist that it’s all part of a plan, that Obama is a super Bond villain set on bringing Western civilization down in ruins. But in fact, it’s all a result of long-term leftist ideas, chief among them, in the case of foreign policy, that A) the United States is the source of the world’s ills, and B) Remove American influence and the world will soon revert to a humanist, collectivist modus vivendi.
(There’s also a third such concept at work in this case as well: the idea that women, with their practicality and compassion, would, once in charge of international relationships, soon put things is order where men have failed for millennia. This is the reason behind Obama’s hiring of Hillary Clinton, an incompetent egomaniac matched only by himself, Susan Rice, who consistently seems lost somewhere between confusion and bewilderment, and Samantha Power, whose “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine strangely disappeared once she needed to defend the Obama administration’s Syria dithering. The results speak for themselves.)
That’s the program that Obama has been carrying out. That’s the basis of “leading from behind,” the “reset,” various Springs and Dawns, and the abandonment of the UK, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, India, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The outcome has been what any high school history student could have told you: invasion, brutality, and genocide. Throughout history, the only instrument to successfully enforce peace has been the superstate: Persia, Rome, the Ottomans, Britannia, the United States of America. The dominant power must act as the dominant power or as nothing. Obama, lost in his choom gang 1970s daydreams, has made the nihilistic choice, and now millions will pay for it.
What can be done? Very little, at this point. To consider otherwise is to assume that this crew of losers -- Obama, Hagel, Rice, Power, and a cast of thousands -- can somehow undo what they set in motion through their own stupidity and self-delusion in the first place. (This is to assume that you can attract Obama’s attention without calling airstrikes against every golf course on the planet). With the coming collapse of Iraq, the avalanche is in motion and cannot be stopped. The best strategy is to ride it out and prepare to pick up the pieces.
A wise man (that being Calvin Coolidge) once stated that “if ya see ten troubles comin’ down the road, you can be sure nine will run into a ditch before they get to ya.” This is simple truth. Not all these disasters will play out completely. Some of them will cancel each other out. Others, like Russia’s return to Soviet-style aggression, are likely to be the final paroxysm before the Russians resume their journey to joining the Sumerians and the Canaanites. We need to select the most urgent and confront them first -- Iranian nuclear weapons leading this particular list. Iraq is one that should be set aside; with fracking and the accelerating switch to a natural gas economy, Iraq, to paraphrase a previously mentioned foreign policy expert, is not worth the bones of a single Nebraska infantryman. (Spare a thought for the 275 troops that O has already seen fit to toss into the cauldron.)
The rest will have to go to the wall -- and this is the truly shameful aspect. It is a superpower’s job above all to maintain order, to assure that the kettle never reaches a full boil, that the bandits and lunatics remain corralled. This is the role that the U.S. has played since WWII, not always perfectly and not always well, but better than most in the sad and terrible human record. This is the role that this country has vacated due to the actions of a man-child with the mentality of a doped-up college undergrad. Americans should be thankful that we will not be called on to pay the full price.
We will have a chance to make up for it, once the current gaggle of gibbering feminists, backwoods oafs, and Chicago hustlers are swept from office. The U.S. remains the most powerful state in history; there is no stand-in. Eventually -- and the sooner the better -- the U.S. will resume its old role, for the simple reason that nobody else can do it.
But one point must be made clear: that the current disaster is the sole property, not only of Barack Obama, but the ideology to which he is enthralled. This same state of affairs occurred once before, during the 1970s. The same exact attitude, the same contempt for U.S. power, the same neverland daydreams of endless Eloi amity and brotherhood. They were adopted in full by Jimmy Carter, who followed the prescription of abrogating U.S. influence and cutting American defense spending. The result was the fall of Ethiopia and Nicaragua, the seizure of Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe, and the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR -- in a phrase, the “falling dominoes” that the American left had laughed away a few years earlier.
But instead of laying the responsibility on Carter and his leftwing supporters, media, the academy, and the Democrats attacked Ronald Reagan in his arduous and in the end successful attempts to put things right. So the leftist mentality survived the debacle of the 70s to reemerge under Obama.
This elitist, murderous, and imbecilic ideology needs to be laid in its grave. The world stands on the verge of a new renaissance, based on incredible technological breakthroughs and a mature understanding of the human condition. The United States is the instrument to bring this about. The one element holding us back, the Western left, has under Obama put up their last dollar and watched it be snatched away. The left is bankrupt in every conceivable sense. It’s time to drag them away from the table and out of the game.
J.R. Dunn
Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/06/obamas_last_card.html
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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