Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad’s regime is destroyed, and for the most part so is Iran’s Axis of Evil which was aligned against Israel and the U.S.
Certainly, the feckless foreign policy idealism of America—the vision of those who pulled the strings of Barack Hussein Obama and its sequel during the Dementia Joe years—was the cause of Iran’s power surge.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Actually, as long ago as the collapse of the Soviet Union, our foreign policy mavens have embraced “the tenets and principles of global interests and norms” that have trumped national interests and norms. The term was “rules-based international order,” and it contributed to the belief that we were the last big dog on the street. And therefore, America became complacent with its power projection. The problem is someone fell asleep at the switch and America has since awakened to the realization that we remain a world power only in our mind’s eye.
Obama’s foreign policy was obviously a product of the clichés and bromides of the foreign policy establishment that comprises federal bureaucracies, leftist media, universities, and think-tanks. In short, diplomatic engagement, international covenants, supranational institutions, and a globalist rather than a nationalist perspective [have failed to keep global order and promote peace and prosperity].
From the beginning, Obama’s ideals were consistent with the globalist framework—he advised that we use our power and wealth to improve the global community, “not in the spirit of a patron but in the spirit of a partner—a partner mindful of [its] own imperfections.” Recall Obama’s unseemly “apology tour,” especially his 2009 comments in Cairo.
Earlier in his State of the Union speech, he had specifically addressed the [moslem] nations with a solicitous promise of a ‘new way forward, based on mutual interests and mutual respect’—Western diplomatic clichés lacking any awareness of orthodox Islam’s teaching about infidels.
In Cairo, Obama’s audience included representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, “the ‘godfather,’ as Lee Smith put it, of modern jihadism,” which made his remarks even further inappropriate. His focus was on the Western sins that provoked the terrorist attack on 9/11, and the subsequent “tensions” between the West and Islam:
[A] colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many [moslems], and a Cold War in which [moslem]-minority were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.
NOTE: The former charge betrays a remarkable ignorance of history on Obama’s part, given that Islam is one of history’s most successful colonial empires—a consequence of invasion, conquest, and settlement—and one that 1400 years after its explosion out of the Arabian Peninsula still occupies territories that were Greco-Roman and Hebraic for millennia.
Given his embrace of foreign policy idealism, naïve Third-Worldism, and leftist animus against the U.S. and Israel, Obama saw the problem of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as an opportunity for a legacy foreign policy achievement.
Hence began the misbegotten Iran JCPOA, the ‘nuclear deal’ that put Iran’s brutal and antisemitic theocracy on the glide-path to possessing nuclear bombs, one accompanied by billions of dollars in Western danegeld.
And this craven appeasement has continued during Biden’s term, despite:
– Iran’s attacks on our troops,
– kidnapping of our citizens,
– serial violations of the treaty,
– training and arming of terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah,
– threats and attacks on our allies, especially Israel,
– cooperation with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and
– support of a brutal dictator in Syria.
Without a doubt:
All the disorder and assaults on our interests in the Middle East are the consequences of Obama’s foreign policy and its continuation by his loyalists who directed Biden’s rancid foreign policy idealism that still drives the “nuclear deal” with Iran.
Further: Obama sought to clip Israel’s wings by aiding Iran and further to make Iran a regional counterweight to Saudi Arabia.
The Kenyan-American also had a hand in perpetuating Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, turning him into a partner of the Iranians and the Russians. His mishandling of the Syrian civil war, too, was a blunder that worsened conditions in an already dysfunctional region.
As the Wall Street Journal recently reported:
It’s worth recalling Barack Obama’s role in keeping Mr. Assad in power. Mr. Obama declined to support the opposition in any important way and then refused to enforce his ‘red line’ against Mr. Assad’s use of sarin and chlorine gas to kill his own people.
Incredibly, Mr. Obama invited Russia to help end the civil war. Vladimir Putin obliged by joining with Iran to prop up Mr. Assad, elbowing the U.S. out, and establishing an air base and a long-desired naval base on the Mediterranean.
This misjudgment helped Iran expand its Axis of Resistance from Tehran to Beirut.
It also reversed the strategic triumph achieved by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s in minimizing the Soviet Union’s influence in the Middle East.
The election of Donald Trump means we have a good chance of undoing much of the damage Obama inflicted on our foreign policy and on our national security by empowering terrorists, and by ushering Iran to the threshold of possessing nuclear weapons.
But the responsibility for these failures is bipartisan. Barack Obama was following the received wisdom of the “rules-based international order” that began to develop over a century ago.
It became unexamined orthodoxy after the Cold War, when the victory was credited not to the U.S.’s strategy of containment, forward deployed troops, and thousands of nuclear warheads. Instead, the ‘new world order,’ exporting liberal democracy, diplomatic engagement, and global trade could create a ‘harmony of interests’ that would make war an anachronism and global peace a possibility.
George H.W. Bush in his 1991 State of the Union address called it:
[A] new world order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind—peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.
Barack Obama is a true believer in all these claims. Again, recall in his cringing speech in Cairo, Obama informed—and no doubt insulted—his moslem listeners:
I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose.
These are not just American ideas; they are human rights.
Seriously, sharing this thought process in a moslem country? And coming from a closet moslem? Whether Obama is ignorant, stupid, or simply socio-economically suicidal, he has been wrong on multiple issues—all to America’s detriment.
Now, Obama’s failures must be broadcasted for all to hear. Restoring realism, traditional wisdom, and common sense must now be the order of American foreign policy.
