Posted on 01/12/2010 8:23:48 AM PST by La Lydia
If the first year of President Barack Obama's foreign policy were a law firm in Charles Dickens's London, it would have a name like Bumble, Stumble and Skid. It began with apologies to the Muslim world, a doomed attempt to beat Israel into line, utopian pleas to abolish nuclear weapons, unreciprocated concessions to Russia, and a curt note to the British..It continued with principled offers of serious negotiation to an Iranian regime too busy torturing, raping and killing demonstrators, and building new underground nuclear facilities, to take them up. Subsequently Beijing gave the world the spectacle of the American commander in chief getting a talking-to about fiscal responsibility from a Communist.
Copenhagen staged not one, but two humiliations: the first when the Olympic Committee delivered the bad news that the president's effort to play hometown booster had failed utterly, before he even landed back in the U.S.; the second when the Chinese once again poked the U.S. in the eye by sending minor officials to meet with Mr. Obama, as they, the Indians and Brazilians tried to shoulder him out of cozy meetings aimed at sabotaging his environmental policy...
It was nonetheless a year of international displays of presidential ego, sometimes disguised as cosmic modesty ("I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war"), but mainly of one slip after another.
Some of these follies stemmed from...sheer naivete, much from the puerile vendetta Mr. Obama waged against the previous administration's record, One hopes that his advisers, and the president himself, recognize the weight of the query reportedly posed by the most formidable contemporary leader of a free country, Nicolas Sarkozy: "Est-il faible?" (Is he weak?). If a year from now world leaders think the answer is "yes," the U.S. will be in deep trouble...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
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My brother (a notable Moonbat) thinks that the single best thing about Obama is the respect he has around the world. Foreign leaders just really want to work with him. It’s so different from that George W. Bush guy ...
You might ask him to name some of the positive outcomes that respect has gained our country.
One could replace a teenager with Obama and have the same result.
Can’t ‘spend’ respect. It’s a nice thing to have, but it isn’t worth trading for.
I’ll take feared over respected any day of the week.
I don’t know how they can call the Copenhagen climate change conference a failure. It succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. No sooner had the delegates got home but North America, Europe, and China were dealing with record cold temperatures. Global warming is a thing of the past. One more such conference and we’ll be in the middle of a new Ice Age.
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