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Paul at Power Line posts on Obama’s foreign affairs mishaps in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
…A recent survey sponsored by the Jerusalem Post showed that only 4 percent of Israelis believe that President Obama’s policies are more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian. Considering that the margin of error in the poll was 4.5 percent, one might wonder whether any Israeli, or at least any Israeli Jew, believes Obama is on the side of America’s long-time ally. …
…When Netanyahu formed a largely “right-wing” coalition government earlier this year, his regime was considered fragile even by Israeli standards. But then the Obama administration insisted that Israel halt all new construction in West Bank settlements, including construction of new homes within large settlements to accommodate natural population. Then it protested plans to build a new apartments in East Jerusalem.
When Netanyahu rejected these demands, his popularity soared. Obama had transformed the least lovable of all Israeli politicians into a leader around whom a strong majority of Israelis could rally.
In foreign affairs, many actions set in motion an equal and opposite reaction. Obama probably hoped that any Israeli reaction against his policies would coincide with an equally strong reaction in his favor in the Arab world.
But while Israelis judged Obama by his words, the Arabs judged him by his results. Thus, when the Netanyahu government refused to halt construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Arab world was not amused.
Now, the administration is trying desperately to cobble together a compromise on settlement construction. But no face-saving compromise will obscure the fact that Obama has squandered America’s credibility on both sides of the Middle East divide …
Jennifer Rubin reports on the return of Zelaya to Honduras and his support from Obama.
The return of ousted leader Manuel Zelaya to Honduras has upped the ante for the Obama administration—and revealed just how counterproductive its approach is there. This report explains:
It was unclear what Mr. Zelaya would do next. He has the support of the international community as well as the U.S., which canceled the visas of many officials in the interim government, and cut some aid to Honduras, one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. However, Mr. Zelaya’s return is vehemently opposed by the country’s institutions, including the congress, the courts, the armed forces and the powerful Catholic Church.
The interim government had hoped elections scheduled for Nov. 29 would produce a new president as a way out of the country’s political impasse. But this option dimmed when the U.S. and other governments suggested they would not recognize the winner. Analysts say the U.S.’s stand strengthened Mr. Zelaya and might have encouraged him to try this last gambit.
So the Obama team is insisting on the return of the man no institution in this democratic country supports–and that position only emboldened that same unpopular figure to return. Nice work. And now that he has returned, will the Obama administration give up its bizarrely stubborn position that no new election can be recognized because that same unpopular figure isn’t back in power? And he isn’t in power, you will recall, because the supreme court and legislature, with the backing of the military, acted in defense of their constitution.
This is Alice-in-Wonderland “diplomacy”–making things worse and more difficult for a U.S. ally while bolstering Hugo Chavez’s ally. Actually, it’s just gross incompetence, which is becoming pretty much par for the course for the Obama foreign-policy wrecking crew.
David Warren with some shorts on Honduras and neoconservatives Bernard Lewis and Irving Kristol.
According to Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, in a letter correcting the Wall Street Journal, it was a Turkish general, speaking shortly after Turkey joined NATO, who said:
“The problem with having the Americans as your allies is that you never know when they’ll turn around and stab themselves in the back.” Lewis has merely dined out on this quotation, for more than half his life. (He is now 93.)
The remark itself is better than a column in describing the horrible night that is descending upon Honduras, where a totalitarian maniac — Manuel Zelaya — is being manoeuvred back into power by the international Left.
Zelaya was deposed under the Honduran constitution, by the army on direct instruction from the Honduran Supreme Court, before he could stack that court and overturn the constitution.
That Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Raul Castro are plotting, occasions no surprise. That president “Lula” of Brazil is now in with them, occasions a little. But that the whole operation is being done with the support of the U.S. State Department, beggars belief. The Americans are once again stabbing themselves in the back and cutting their allies’ throats, while appeasing their enemies. What more can be said? …
Mark Helprin showed up in WSJ with a piece on the Obama’s appeasement of Iran and Russia.
…With both a collapsing economy and natural gas reserves sufficient to produce 270 years of electricity, the surplus of which it exports, Iran does not need nuclear electrical generation at a cost many times that of its gas-fired plants. It does, however, have every reason, according to its own lights, to seek nuclear weapons—to deter American intervention; to insure against a resurgent Iraq; to provide some offset to nearby nuclear powers Pakistan, Russia and Israel; to move toward hegemony in the Persian Gulf and address the embarrassment of a more militarily capable Saudi Arabia; to rid the Islamic world of Western domination; to neutralize Israel’s nuclear capacity while simultaneously creating the opportunity to destroy it with one shot; and, pertinent to last week’s events, by nuclear intimidation to turn Europe entirely against American interests in the Middle East.
Some security analysts may comfort themselves with the illusion that soon-to-be nuclear Iran is a rational actor, but no country gripped so intensely by a cult of martyrdom and death that to clear minefields it marched its own children across them can be deemed rational. …
…When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich at least he thought he had obtained something in return for his appeasement. The new American diplomacy is nothing more than a sentimental flood of unilateral concessions—not least, after some minor Putinesque sabre rattling, to Russia. Canceling the missile deployment within NATO, which Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian ambassador to that body, characterizes as “the Americans . . . simply correcting their own mistake, and we are not duty bound to pay someone for putting their own mistakes right,” is to grant Russia a veto over sovereign defensive measures—exactly the opposite of American resolve during the Euro Missile Crisis of 1983, the last and definitive battle of the Cold War.
Stalin tested Truman with the Berlin Blockade, and Truman held fast. Khrushchev tested Kennedy, and in the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy refused to blink. In 1983, Andropov took the measure of Reagan, and, defying millions in the street (who are now the Obama base), Reagan did not blink. Last week, the Iranian president and the Russian prime minister put Mr. Obama to the test, and he blinked not once but twice. The price of such infirmity has always proven immensely high, even if, as is the custom these days, the bill has yet to come.
In The Daily Telegraph, UK, Nile Gardiner explains why Obama is liked at the UN.
…The president scores highly at the UN for refusing to project American values and military might on the world stage, with rare exceptions like the war against the Taliban. His appeasement of Iran, his bullying of Israel, his surrender to Moscow, his call for a nuclear free world, his siding with Marxists in Honduras, his talk of a climate change deal, have all won him plaudits in the large number of UN member states where US foreign policy has traditionally been viewed with contempt.
Simply put, Barack Obama is loved at the UN because he largely fails to advance real American leadership. This is a dangerous strategy of decline that will weaken US power and make her far more vulnerable to attack.
As we saw last week with his shameful surrender to Moscow over missile defence, the president is perfectly happy to undermine America’s allies and gut its strategic defences while currying favour with enemies and strategic competitors. The missile defence debacle is rightly viewed as a betrayal by the Poles and the Czechs, and Washington has clearly given the impression that it cares little about those who have bravely stood shoulder to shoulder with their US allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider war on terror.
The Obama administration is now overseeing and implementing the biggest decline in American global power since Jimmy Carter. Unfortunately it may well take another generation for the United States to recover.
Peter Wehner comments on the president’s UN speech.
… No one believes America’s history is pristine; we are all familiar with the catalogue of our own sins, beginning with slavery. Other presidents have recognized them, and a few have given voice to them. But it was done in the context of a reverence for America—for what it has been and stands for, for what it is and can be. Think of the words of George Washington, who said of America, “I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.” That is a noble sentiment from a man whose love of country knew no bounds. They are also words that I cannot imagine President Obama saying, at least with conviction. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like his country or admire things about it; it means that he has yet to really speak out for it. And it means that he has shown, so far at least, that he is more interested in advancing his interests than in speaking on behalf of the nation that elected him. There are enough critics of America in the world; we don’t need to add America’s president to that list.
Perhaps Mr. Obama will come to understand that there is a problem when the president of the United States—an “inestimable jewel,” Lincoln called her—has harsher things to say about his own country than he does about many of the worst regimes on Earth.
It is all quite disturbing, and to have to say this about an American president almost makes me sick.
Krauthammer’s Take on the speech from The Corner.
… This speech hovered somewhere between embarrassing and dangerous. You had a president of the United States actually saying: “No [one] nation can or should try to dominate another.”
I will buy the “should try to” as kind of adolescent wishful thinking. But “no [one] nation can dominate another”? What planet is he living on? It is the story of man. What does he think Russia is doing to Georgia?
But the alarming part is what he said in the same paragraph where he said that it makes no sense anymore “the alignments of nations that are rooted in the cleavages of the Cold War.”
Well, NATO is rooted in the cleavage of the Cold War. The European Union is rooted in the cleavage of the Cold War. Our alliances with Japan and Korea and the Philippines, our guarantees to Taiwan and Eastern Europe are all rooted in the cleavage of the Cold War. (Interesting noun, incidentally.)
So he is saying that is all now irrelevant. What does he think our allies are going to think who hear this?
Obama’s speech is alarming because it says the United States has no more moral right to act or to influence world history than Bangladesh or Sierra Leone. …
Michael Barone says that Obama relies too much on formulaic Marxist interpretations of history that he learned at college.
…On the Sunday talk shows a day before Woodward’s story appeared, Obama said he had not yet decided on a strategy in Afghanistan. “I’m certainly not one who believes in indefinite occupations of other countries,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” as if the United States were occupying a country against the wishes of most of its inhabitants to the detriment of “the people.” Shades of those early 1980s Marxist Latin America tracts.
The reaction to the most recent moves has been harsh, and from unexpected quarters. Leslie Gelb, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the editorial writers of The Washington Post have expressed astonishment at Obama’s apparent switch on Afghanistan. Edward Lucas, former Eastern European correspondent for the Economist, wrote in the Telegraph of London, “The picture emerging from the White House is a disturbing one, of timidity, clumsiness and short-term calculation. Some say he is the weakest president since Jimmy Carter.” …
…But on foreign policy as his record emerges — as he reverses himself on missile defense and perhaps on Afghanistan — his motivating principle seems rooted in an analysis, common in his formative university years, that America has too often been on the side of the bad guys. The response has been to disrespect those who have been our friends and to bow to our enemies.
George Will looks at the economic costs we will be facing due to Obama giving in to unions and protectionism.
While in Pittsburgh, a sense of seemliness should prevent President Obama from again exhorting the Group of 20, as he did April 2 in London, to be strong in resisting domestic pressures for protectionism. This month, invertebrate as he invariably is when organized labor barks, he imposed a 35 percent tariff on imports of tires that China makes for the low-price end of the market. This antic nonsense matters not only because of trade disruptions it may cause but also because it is evidence of his willowy weakness under pressure from his political patrons. …
…The president smote China because a single union, the United Steelworkers, asked him to. It represents rubber workers, but only those responsible for 47 percent of U.S. tiremaking. The president’s action will not create more than a negligible number of jobs, if any. It will not restore a significant number, if any, of the almost 5,200 jobs that were lost in the tire industry from 2004 to 2008. Rather, the president will create jobs in other nations (e.g., Mexico, Indonesia) that make low-end tires. They make them partly because some U.S. firms have outsourced the manufacturing of such tires to low-wage countries so the U.S. firms can make a small profit, while making high-end and higher-profit tires here in high-wage America.
The 215 percent increase in tire imports from China is largely the fault, so to speak, of lower-income Americans, many of whom will respond to the presidential increase in the cost of low-end tires by driving longer on their worn tires. How many injuries and deaths will this cause? How many jobs will it cost in tire replacement businesses or among longshoremen who handle imports? We will find out. The costs of the president’s sacrifice of the national interest to the economic illiteracy of a single labor union may also include injuries China might inflict by imposing retaliatory protectionism or reducing its purchases of U.S. government debt, purchases that enable Americans to consume more government services than they are willing to pay for. …
Roger Simon has an interesting post on The NY Times versus Glenn Beck.
…You could almost feel sympathy for Times editor Jill Abramson, when she laughably excused the paper’s lack of coverage of ACORN as under-staffing on a holiday weekend, were she not so fundamentally meretricious – dishonest, I strongly suspect, even to herself. The level of reification among Times people is extraordinary. Few of them have altered their worldview even a jot for decades. The revelation of ACORN as rotten to the core and a near-perfect illustration of a fundamental flaw in the welfare state is a challenge to their weltanschauung so extreme it would engender personality disintegration.
So the flaying of John Edwards is, for them, something of a cover. It is a way to show even-handedness in a harmless situation when no even-handedness is evident on more serious matters (not just ACORN, but the CIA, water-boarding, global warming, healthcare, the economy, etc., etc.). …
…For the moment the Right is winning and there is no greater reason for this than Glenn Beck. To be honest, Beck makes me feel uneasy. He embarrasses me. He often seems like a man on the verge of an ataque de nervios, as Pedro Almodovar once had it. I don’t know if he is going to fly off the handle, blow up or what.
But he also very often seems to be right (small r). Beck has been the first and, for quite a while, the only one to be assiduously connecting the dots between Obama, Ayers, the two Joneses and the rest of the post-sixties crew that seems to have never gotten over the Port Huron Statement, with the Chicago School of neo-Boss Tweed politics. These are dots that should have been connected by the mainstream media long ago, but, as we all know, they didn’t want to look at them. New Media hasn’t done a great job of connecting these dots either because, frankly, we don’t yet have the skills or manpower. But Beck is doing it. More power to him. Let’s help…
John Tierney, in The New York Times, discusses health and longevity in the US and separates fact from fiction.
…But there are many more differences between Europe and the United States than just the health care system. Americans are more ethnically diverse. They eat different food. They are fatter. Perhaps most important, they used to be exceptionally heavy smokers. For four decades, until the mid-1980s, per-capita cigarette consumption was higher in the United States (particularly among women) than anywhere else in the developed world. Dr. Preston and other researchers have calculated that if deaths due to smoking were excluded, the United States would rise to the top half of the longevity rankings for developed countries.
As it is, the longevity gap starts at birth and persists through middle age, but then it eventually disappears. If you reach 80 in the United States, your life expectancy is longer than in most other developed countries. The United States is apparently doing something right for its aging population, but what?
One frequent answer has been Medicare. Its universal coverage for people over 65 has often been credited with shrinking the longevity gap between the United States and other developed countries.
But when Dr. Preston and a Penn colleague, Jessica Y. Ho, looked at mortality rates in 1965, before Medicare went into effect, they found an even more pronounced version of today’s pattern: middle-aged people died much more often in the United States than in other developed countries, but the longevity gap shrunk with age even faster than today. In that pre-Medicare era, an American who reached 75 could expect to live longer than most people elsewhere. …
David Harsanyi introduces us to Science Czar, Dr. Steven Chu.
…This week, prepping for the upcoming Copenhagen climate change talks, Dr. Steven Chu, our erstwhile Energy secretary, crystallized the administration’s underling thinking by claiming that the “American public . . . just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.” …
…Chu will deploy bureaucrats to more than 6,000 public schools to, um, teach children about “climate change” and efficiency. They probably won’t mention that the Energy Department was found to have wasted millions on inefficient use of energy by an independent auditor this year. …
And yes, Chu the adult likes to say that coal — which, as we speak, is likely powering your computer, your office, your house and allows your kids to sit in their schoolhouse without freezing their little toes off in early fall — is his “worst nightmare.”
Coal. Not an energy that is running its course nor one that the market will replace. This energy source accounts for more than half of electricity production in the entire nation.
Chu, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner — and, unlike me, a deadly serious person — believes that “all the world’s roofs should be painted white as part of efforts to slow global warming.” …
Bjorn Lomborg continues to believe in global warming, and continues to believe it is, in part, human-caused. However, he does not think that reducing carbon emissions is the most logical, effective, or practical solution.
…A global deal based around carbon cuts is expected to include a lot of spending from rich countries to help poor nations to prepare for global warming. There is a great danger that this will actually be diverted away from saving lives that are at risk from today’s problems. Developed countries seem set to spend much money to save few lives in the distant future, instead of combating malnutrition, malaria, or communicable diseases today. It is amoral to build a dam to avoid flooding in 100 years, when the people living beside that dam are starving today. We should be helping communities become stronger today and better able to prepare for global warming in 50 years.
Little wonder that five of the world’s top economists–including three Nobel laureates–who gathered this month for the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate to evaluate policy responses to climate change found that global carbon taxes are a “very poor” option.
Yet, carbon cuts have become the mantra of the political elite. We need another way that is politically feasible, economically responsible and morally right. World leaders should focus on the investments that the economists for the Copenhagen Consensus project found most promising.
Imagine we could fix climate for the next hundred years for less than what the U.S. spends on climate research in a year. Research from Eric Bickel of the University of Texas highlights the potential of climate engineering to do just that. …
Jonathan Tobin in Contentions says even the NY Times is publishing items globalony skeptics will love.
In an article that might well have deserved publication in the Onion, the New York Times introduced a heretical notion to its readership today. Despite the fact that any skepticism about global warming and the responsibility of humanity for this rise in temperatures is now considered proof of insanity, the Times reported that it appears more than likely that “global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.”
This must come as quite a shock to an American public that has been relentlessly propagandized on this issue and convinced that the end of civilization as we know it is just around the corner. But facts are stubborn things, and for all the hoopla about “saving the planet,” now even the Times is prepared to admit that far from heating up at the exponential rates Al Gore has discussed to near universal applause, it appears that the story is a bit more complicated than he may have let on. …