Our Reset Reset Foreign Policy

· Thursday, March 11, 2010

Almost every element of Barack Obama's once-heralded new "reset" foreign policy of a year ago has either been reset or likely soon will be.

Consider Obama's approach to the 8-year-old war on terror. Plans made more than a year ago to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010 have stalled. Despite loud proclamations about trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, in a civilian court in New York, such an absurd pledge will probably never be kept.

Talk of trying our own former CIA interrogators for being too tough on terrorist suspects has also come to nothing. And why not put an end to the second-guessing of anti-terrorism protocols since the Obama administration, in a single year, has quadrupled the number of assassinations by Predator drones of suspected Taliban and al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan? After all, the targeted killing of hundreds of suspects is far more questionable than waterboarding three confessed killers.

The Obama administration seems to have embraced the once widely criticized Bush-Petraeus strategy in Iraq of gradual withdrawal in concert with Iraqi benchmarks. Indeed, Vice President Joe Biden in Orwellian fashion claims that our victory in Iraq may be one of the administration's "greatest achievements." Was it not a defeatist Biden who not long ago advocated the trisection of Iraq into separate nations?

And after months of waiting, Obama finally sent more troops to Afghanistan, adopting a surge strategy that looks a lot like Bush's 2007 escalation in Iraq -- this after he once assured the country that Bush's surge, in a tactical sense, "wasn't working."

Almost all of the once derided Bush anti-terrorism protocols are still in place -- wiretaps, intercepts, tribunals, and renditions. And given that there were more foiled radical Islamic terrorist plots in 2009 than in any year since 2001, President Obama will probably stop his outreach speeches to the Islamic world and his serial recitations of American sins.

Our efforts to reach out and negotiate directly with Iran failed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton effectively acknowledged the impasse, citing the unexpected de facto military coup by the Revolutionary Guard. In any case, does anyone believe that more Obama speeches, videos, new diplomacy and imposed deadlines will halt an Iranian nuclear bomb?

President Obama was once a fierce critic of the former administration's Mideast policies. A year ago, he thought new outreach to the Palestinians and rebuke to the Israelis might lead to a breakthrough. It did not. In a Time magazine interview with Joe Klein, Obama confesses of the 70-year struggle: "I'll be honest with you. This is just really hard."

Obama assumed we could borrow a trillion dollars from the communist Chinese and then turn around and lecture them on Tibet, human rights, and international trade and currency -- sort of like a debtor admonishing his lender about his bank's shortcomings. Now the Chinese claim that their relations with America are "seriously disrupted," as they seek to dethrone the dollar as the global currency.

I don't think there will be anymore grand deals with the Russians either, the sort that saw the United States withdraw anti-missile defense accords with Poland and the Czech Republic in hopes of halting the Iranian nuclear program. Instead, Russia and China are blocking American efforts to impose tougher sanctions on Iran.

For all the outreach to Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan strongman is still causing trouble in Latin America.

So why is the reset foreign policy being reset?

First, too often Obama boxed himself into a corner by being against, in knee-jerk fashion, almost anything George Bush was for. Yet most of America's problems predated George Bush, who, especially in his second term, followed mostly centrist policies. Old enemies were enemies for a reason -- and it had nothing to do with Bush.

Second, Obama's utopian rhetoric created impossible expectations of a new international brotherhood. So the disappointment became greater when nations simply acted like their usual self-interested selves instead of idealistic groupies at an Obama hope and change rally.

Third, the constant televised presence of Obama on his 24/7 bully pulpit has surely resulted in Obama fatigue. Most nations don't seem to fear any of his deadlines or appear mesmerized by his soaring rhetorical flourishes.

Fourth, the nearly $2 trillion dollar annual deficit curbs both the moral and material power of the United States, which has gone into hock to unsavory nations.

Fortunately, for the country, Obama did not take three years to reverse course, unlike Jimmy Carter whose inaction led to a series of foreign policy catastrophes like the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

By voluntarily backtracking -- or being rebuffed -- on almost all his initiatives, an idealistic Obama is reminding the world that anti-Americanism abroad is not caused so much by what the United States does, but largely by preconceived hostility to the values of liberty, free markets, and individual rights that the United States represents.

(C) 2010 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.


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Comments

Alex Torello

A sobering reminder of the unpreparedness, wrong-thinking and downright fabrication that was the Obama campaign.

Unfortunately, Americans will pay the price for years to come, Obama apologists will spin the facts to suit their agenda, and Obama/Biden will have a suitable number of monuments dedicated to them.

Much of this the result of lowered voting age and lack of verification at polling stations.

Posted March 11, 2010 at 11:58:39 AM


MichaelSSEC

Once again, I am perplexed at the baffling assumption that President Obama is merely naive, that his Utopian vision failed due to his inexperience, that his foreign policies failed due to his trying to do too much.

Rubbish.

Why are so many people assuming Obama ever wanted what's best for America? Can someone point to a single policy of the Obama administration that was best for America? Indeed, his every policy has been exactly the opposite of what's best for the country.

Rather than supporting the Democratic reforms in Iraq, Obama is sticking to his arbitrary pullout policy. It's as though he wants Iraqi Democracy to fail.

Rather than supporting the Iranian pro-Democracy demonstrators, who cited Iraqi Democracy as direct inspiration for their protests, Obama sided with the tyrannical regime and threw the demonstrators under the bus.

Rather than supporting Israel against Islamic terrorist groups like Hamas, Obama gave Hamas $200 million that everyone knows they will use to buy more weapons with which to shell Israel, and then told Israel to shut up and sit down.

Rather than take the historic opportunity during his address to the UN, to call upon the world to impose tough sanctions on Iran in order to force that nation to abandon its nuke program, Obama stuffed intelligence data into his pocket -- data which showed Iran was using hundreds more centrifuges than previously thought -- and went ahead with his meaningless prepared speech.

Rather than taking a hard-line stance against nuclear proliferation in Iran, Obama declared that country has a "right" to nuclear technology, even after they announced their intention to "wipe Israel off the map" using nuclear weapons.

Rather than supporting Democracy in Honduras after President Zelaya attempted to make himself dictator there, Obama inexplicably scolded Honduras for following its own Constitution and ousting the would-be tyrant. He even instructed SecState Clinton to impose sanctions on Honduras if they did not re-instate Zelaya in violation of their own laws. Only after public outcry did he relent, and then he tried to pretend he'd simply been interested in insuring Honduras followed its Constitution -- which they'd been doing quite bravely all along.

Rather than pursuing proven, sane fiscal policy in response to the recession in order to right the economy and get America moving again, Obama spent money at a record-setting pace. But while claiming that money was creating jobs, he actually funneled most of it to the unions that gave millions to his campaign, to the big Wall St firms whose bad bets triggered the recession, and to AIG whose business includes covering Congressmen's insurance. Well, that is, except for the money he channeled to foreign banks and governments -- that nobody wants to explain or account for. While all this hoaxing was going on, Obama tried to ram through the economy-killing Cap & Trade bill, which enables the con men pushing global warming to tax everyone and everything, even for breathing. How imposing the single largest tax in human history was supposed to help the recessed economy nobody has ever explained. And while that boondoggle was flailing through Congress, Obama tried FOUR TIMES to ram the biggest entitlement program in American history through Congress, over the explicit objections of majorities of voters, his Socialist coup, Obamacare. How that behemoth was supposed to be paid for at any time much less while the country wallows in recession, is anybody's guess. Obama's math seems to have been cooked up while he was wolfing down lines of cocaine at Harvard.

Those are just the highlights. There was also the astounding treatment of the THREE terrorist acts in 2009, which Obama could not bring himself to label as such, but instead incongruously chided Americans not to "jump to conclusions." This caused rational people to scratch their heads and wonder just what it would take to convince the President that an act of terror had taken place. A mushroom cloud over New York City, with a love note signed by Osama?

There is no evidence -- none whatsoever -- that Obama has as his goal what's best for America. On the contrary, all evidence to date strongly indicates that the weakening of this proud country militarily, economically and diplomatically is this President's chief goal, with the emboldening of our enemies as his secondary aim. To sit and ponder how he could be so naive as to make all these mistakes is itself an act of naivety. These are not mistakes at all. To this President, they are unqualified successes.

Posted March 11, 2010 at 3:48:08 PM


TJS

Obama is trying to replace Jimmy Carter as our worst president. Obama is succeeding.

Posted March 11, 2010 at 4:25:16 PM


ILEANA

Michael, I agree with you. It is utter non-sense that BO is naive. He knows exactly what he is doing and we have a very small window of time left to stop him before he destroys our country.

Posted March 11, 2010 at 7:59:26 PM


Cincinnatius

Bravo! I too have marveled over the reticence of so many to characterize Obama's actions as being engineered to be detrimental to America. You did an excellent job of listing these actions and their appearance of malfeasance. The question I have is this: When does the congress recognize this malfeasance and impeach Obama for his attempted subversion of America?

Posted March 13, 2010 at 10:48:43 AM


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