Obama: Earning Contempt, at Home and Abroad

From Thucydides’s Athens to 21st-century America, appeasement is not a winner. 

The common bond among the various elements of the failed Obama foreign policy — from reset with Putin to concessions to the Iranians — is a misreading of human nature. The so-called Enlightened mind claims that the more rationally and deferentially one treats someone pathological, the more likely it is that he will respond and reform — or at least behave. The medieval mind, within us all, claims the opposite is more likely to be true. 

Read Gerhard Weinberg’s A World at Arms or Richard Overy’s 1939, for an account of the negotiations preceding World War II, and you will find that an underappreciated theme emerges: the autocratic accentuation of the human tendency to interpret concession and empathy not as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but rather as weakness to be exploited or as a confession of culpability worthy of contempt.

The more Britain’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier in 1938 genuinely sought to reassure Hitler of their benign intentions, the more the Nazi hierarchy saw them as little more than “worms” — squirming to appease the stronger spirit. Both were seen as unsure of who they were and what they stood for, ready to forfeit the memory of the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of their own on the false altar of a supposedly mean and unfair Versailles Treaty. 

Hitler perversely admired Stalin after the latter liquidated a million German prisoners, and hated FDR, whose armies treated German POWs with relative humanity. In matters big and small, from Sophocles’ Antigone to Shakespeare’s King Lear, we see the noble and dutiful treated worse by their beneficiaries than the duplicitous and traitorous. Awareness of this pernicious trait is not cynical encouragement to adopt such pathologies and accept our dog-eat-dog world. Rather, in the postmodern, high-tech 21st century, we sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we have evolved to a higher level than what Thucydides saw at Melos or Corcyra — a conceit that is dangerous for the powerful and often fatal for the weaker.

Via: National Review

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Obama’s Waffling Foreign Policy

AFP PHOTO/Mandel NGANMANDEL NGAN/AFP/GettyImages

President Obama’s foreign policy over the course of his presidency has suffered from severe inconsistency, writes Heritage Foundation distinguished fellow Kim Holmes in The Washington Times:

He’ll draw red lines in Syria and threaten military strikes, then call off the strikes and convene diplomatic conferences. If he’s not killing terrorists with drones, he’s bringing them to New York for civilian trial. He’ll bypass the United Nations Security Council to take military action against Syria, but demand its approval before bombing Libya.

As Jackson Diehl wrote in The Washington Post this week, even if “al-Qaeda’s new base in eastern Syria, Hezbollah’s deployment of tens of thousands of missiles in Lebanon and the crumbling of the U.S.-fostered Iraqi political system pose no particular threat to America,” these are major concerns to U.S. allies. This leaves our allies wondering whether the U.S. will act to defend them in the face of aggression from common foes.

This is no way to lead a country on the international stage and is a result of President Obama’s being, as Holmes puts it, “deeply conflicted about the purposes of American power.” Consistent policy is based on conviction, and without conviction, a leader cannot successfully defend his actions to allies. More importantly, he has no chance of expecting those allies to maintain their trust in the security he is supposed to provide.

Via: The Foundry

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The Dark Solipsism of Barack: Why a “Leadership” Vacuum May Not Bother Him at All

Obama has now been officially categorized as a failed president of foreign policy. Perhaps it’s now only a matter of time before his transparent ineptness is blamed for America’s domestic debacle of the last 5 years. But what if there were a different interpretation of Barack, his values and decision making?

Consider an entirely contrary scenario—that Obama is using his power and influence to repeatedly create confusion, chaos and decline—all the while playing himself off as progressively—either a stunningly astute political magi, an idealistic genius of a professor, or now a bumbling nincompoop of a leader approximating Barney Fife in the Oval Office. Yet, all the while underneath a glowering and highly committed Marxist revolutionary. Solipsism is, by the way, the sense that only one person’s opinion exists, that only one way of seeing things matters. It is malignant monomania—the default worldview of the tyrant.

Having now heard the universe of opinion on Barack—anywhere from being a messiah to a devil, what do his actions suggest? In a word, a Marxist Revolutionary. That is at least one informed guess with corresponding evidence. Deferring to the famous standard of science icon Thomas Kuhn—the events of Obama’s public life and past are much more easily explained by a Marxist worldview (paradigm) than any other, including sheer incompetence (see Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

Via: Canada Free Press

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AP Takes Meat Cleaver To Obama Foreign Policy

WASHINGTON (AP) - Nearly five years into his presidency, Barack Obama confronts a world far different from what he envisioned when he first took office. U.S. influence is declining in the Middle East as violence and instability rock Arab countries. An ambitious attempt to reset U.S. relations with Russia faltered and failed. Even in Obama-friendly Europe, there's deep skepticism about Washington's government surveillance programs.

In some cases, the current climate has been driven by factors outside the White House's control. But missteps by the president also are to blame, say foreign policy analysts, including some who worked for the Obama administration.

Among them: miscalculating the fallout from the Arab Spring uprisings, publicly setting unrealistic expectations for improved ties with Russia and a reactive decision-making process that can leave the White House appearing to veer from crisis to crisis without a broader strategy.

Rosa Brooks, a former Defense Department official who left the administration in 2011, said that while the shrinking U.S. leverage overseas predates the current president, "Obama has sometimes equated 'we have no leverage' with 'there's no point to really doing anything'."

Obama, faced most urgently with escalating crises in Egypt and Syria, has defended his measured approach, saying America's ability to solve the world's problems on its own has been "overstated."

Via: AP

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Obama shapes foreign policy from an American cocoon

When two foreign policy experts with quite different perspectives produce interestingly similar analyses of a president's foreign policy, it's usually wise to take notice.

The two authors are Robert Kaplan, chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, writing in realclearworld.com, and Elliott Abrams, an appointee in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations now at the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in the September issue of Commentary.

Kaplan has traveled to trouble distant lands and can be labeled a realist. But he also thinks presidents should have an "overriding vision" of how they want to shape and influence the world.

Policy toward any one nation or region should be shaped "with a larger purpose in mind," he writes. "There must be a specific moral and geographic logic that governs America's approach to the world."

He concedes that Barack Obama's foreign policy "is not at all terrible," but says it lacks this sense of purpose. All he finds is this: "I am not George W. Bush. He started wars. I will end them. I will kill individual terrorists as they crop up. That's all, thank you."

Abrams is usually placed in the neoconservative camp, by admirers as well as critics. But like Kaplan he sees something unusual in Obama's foreign policy. It is, he writes, "strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with or must confront."

He focuses on key Obama foreign policy speeches -- and finds little there there. He notes that Obama called for a "new era of engagement" in his 2009 State of the Union speech.

Via: Washington Examiner

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Poll: Romney Up 6-Points In Florida, 51%-45%…

Florida continues to look good for Mitt Romney. The Republican holds a 6-point lead in the state essential to his hopes of defeating President Barack Obama, according to a new Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/Miami Herald poll.

The poll shows slight tightening, with Romney's 51-45 lead down 1 percentage point from the Times'statewide poll a month ago. Other Florida surveys show a tighter contest and both campaigns are blanketing the state with appearances geared toward scraping together every last vote.

Still, nearly every key indicator in theTimes' pre-Election Day poll reveals Romney's advantage in a state Obama won four years ago.

Florida voters trust Romney more to fix the economy and give him an edge, 50 percent to 48 percent, on who will look out more for the middle class — a stark turn from past months when Obama and his allies unleashed a barrage of TV ads portraying Romney as an out-of-touch corporate raider.

Romney even has a slight advantage on foreign policy, with 2 percent more voters saying they trust him over Obama, who has faced criticism over the fatal attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya.

"Florida typically is a little bit more Republican than the rest of the country," said Brad Coker of Mason-Dixon Polling and Research, which conducted the poll for the Times and its media partners.

In 2008, Sen. John McCain "only lost by 3 points here and he lost by 7 nationally," Coker added. "Three points is not a lot of ground to make up in Florida for a Republican, particularly when the president's popularity is mixed, at best."

Via: Tampa Bay News

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Charles Krauthammer on the Third Presidential Debate: “It’s Unequivocal Mitt Romney Won”

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer reacted to the third presidential debate at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. He said, “I think it’s unequivocal Mitt Romney won.”

Krauthammer told Megyn Kelly on Fox News that Romney won both tactically and strategically. He assessed that Romney had to show the American people that he was someone they can trust as commander in chief.

During the debate, he said, “Romney went large. Obama went very, very small – shockingly small. Romney made a strategic decision not to go after president on Libya or Syria or other areas where Obama could accuse him of being a Bush-like war monger.”

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The highest point for Romney, Krauthammer identified as the point when he “devastatingly leveled the charge of Obama going around the world on an apology tour.”

Via: Fox News Insider

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Morning Bell: 10 Questions for the Vice Presidential Debate

Tonight’s debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Representative Paul Ryan is supposed to cover both domestic and foreign policy. The Heritage Foundation’s policy experts have submitted 10 questions they would like to see asked in the debate.

Watch with us tonight—we will be streaming the debate live at 9 p.m. ET on our Debate 2012 page, with an experts’ live blog.

DOMESTIC POLICY

1. Obamacare takes $716 billion out of Medicare to fund Obamacare. This includes $156 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage. Currently, 27 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, which is a private alternative to traditional Medicare. The Medicare Chief Actuary projects that by 2017, Obamacare’s severe cuts will decrease enrollment in Medicare Advantage by 50 percent and result in less generous benefit packages for those who do remain in the program. What changes would you make, if any, to ensure that these seniors are able to keep their current Medicare Advantage plan?

2. Patient choice is working well within Medicare and other government health programs. In addition to the private plans in Medicare Advantage, there are 1,100 plans in the Medicare drug program and hundreds of plans in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. None of these plans use “vouchers”; they receive a direct government contribution toward the cost of the plans. Would you expand patient choice in Medicare? Why or why not?

3. Most people under the age of 40 will pay more in Social Security taxes than they will receive in benefits, and Medicare adds to federal deficits faster than any other government spending program. How would you focus entitlement reform on reducing spending?

4. Under Obamacare, the Health and Human Services (HHS) preventive services mandate requires nearly all employers to cover abortion drugs and contraception regardless of religious or moral objection, effectively exempting only formal houses of worship. Should Americans be able to live out their faith commitments outside the four walls of their church—in the public square and in the way they run their businesses or non-profits?

5. It has been almost four years since the federal government took control of General Motors. Vice President Biden has said the bailout of the firm was a success. Was this a success? Why or why not? And when should the federal government sell the shares it still owns?

Obama: ‘One Of The Proudest Things Of My Three Years In Office Is Helping To Restore A Sense Of Respect For America Around The World’

President Obama has said that elevating the image of the United States around the world was one of his proudest foreign policy accomplishments, but those remarks could boomerang and hamper his reelection bid.

The violence and anti-American protests throughout the Middle East are bringing fresh attacks on the president’s foreign policies as Muslim rage is intensifying in the region.

The protests that have spread could undercut one of the key tenants of Obama's foreign policy argument that he has restored the U.S. image in the Middle East.

In February, Obama said, “One of the proudest things of my three years in office is helping to restore a sense of respect for America around the world, a belief that we are not just defined by the size of our military.”

Three years ago in Cairo, Obama stressed his leadership would be dramatically different than former President George W. Bush’s: “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition.”

Via: The Hill

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