It's not exactly news that Obama has lost America. But in a less public referendum, he also lost the world

[Sandra]

It's not exactly news that Obama has lost America. But in a less public referendum, he also lost the world.

Obama Has Lost the World

 By Daniel Greenfield  Sunday, December 26, 2010

After the 2010 elections, it’s not exactly news that Obama has lost
America. But in a less public referendum, he also lost the world. Obama’s
cocktail party tour of the world’s capitals may look impressive on a map,
but is irrelevant on a policy level. In less than two years, the White
House has gone from being the center of world leadership to being
irrelevant, from protecting world freedom to serving as a global party
planning committee.

Even the Bush Administration’s harshest critics could never have credibly
claimed that George W. Bush was irrelevant. He might have been hated,
pilloried and shouted about­ but he couldn’t be ignored. However Obama can
be safely ignored. Invited to parties, given the chance to show off his
cosmopolitan sophisticated by reciting one or two words in the local
lingo, read off a teleprompter, along with some cant about the need for
everyone to pull together and make the world a better place, and then
dismissed for the rest of the evening.

As a world leader, he makes a passable party guest. He has a broad smile,
brings along his own gifts and is famous in the way that celebrities,
rather than prime ministers and presidents are famous. On an invitation
list, he is more Bono than Sarkozy, Leonardo DiCaprio not Putin. You
don’t invite him to talk turkey, not even on Thanksgiving. He’s just one
of those famous people with a passing interest in politics who gets good
media attention, but who has nothing worthwhile to say.

The only countries who take Obama seriously, are the ones who have to.
The leaders of Great Britain, Israel and Japan­ who have tied their
countries to an enduring alliance with America based on mutual interests
and values, only to discover that the latest fellow to sit behind the
Oval Office desk no longer shares those values and couldn’t give less of
a damn about American interests. It’s no wonder that European leaders
ignore him as much as possible. Or that Netanyahu visited America, while
Obama was abroad. Or that Japanese politics have become dangerously
unstable.

On the enemy side, the growing aggressiveness of China, North Korea,
Iran, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda can all be attributed to the global
consensus that no one is at home in the White House.And if no one is at
home in the White House, then that’s a perfect time to slap the big boy
around the yard. China is doing it economically, the rest are doing it
militarily. They’re all on board with Obama’s Post-American vision of the
world. But unlike him and most liberals, they have a clear understanding
of what that means. The America of some years back, which actually
intimidated Libyan dictator Khaddafi into giving up his nuclear program,
without lifting a hand against him is long gone. So is the Cedar
Revolution. Syria and Iran are back in charge in Lebanon. And in
Afghanistan, the Taliban are laughing at our soft power outreach
efforts.

Obama’s soft power approach emphasizes the ‘soft’ and forgets the
‘power’. It neglects even Clinton era understandings about the role of
America in the world, and reverts instead to a Carter era sense of guilt
that bleeds into hostility toward American interests and allies. While
the rest of the world puts their own interests first, they act like a cog
in some imaginary global community, turning and turning toward the
distant horizon of international brotherhood. While China, Russia and
most of the world walk down their backs and up their jellyfish spines,
laughing all the way. And America’s allies gird themselves and prepare
for the worst.


From the first, this administration has curried favor with America’s
enemies by betraying and humiliating its allies. But these hideous acts
of moral cowardice have not won Obama the approval of America’s enemies.
Only their contempt. And a Nobel Peace Prize from a committee of elderly
left wing Swedes, awarded not for any accomplishment, but for the lack
thereof. For being a man without a country, a leader without a spine and
a representative of America who gives no thought for the interests of
that country.

Now that the Koreas stand on the brink of war, Iran continues its drive
toward a nuclear bomb, Al Qaeda is going global, Hezbollah is on the
verge of taking Lebanon and Mexico is on the verge of imploding ­the
impact of America’s absence on the global stage is all too clear. The
countless cocktail parties and toasts have not changed the world. All
they’ve done is highlighted the transition of the White House from world
leadership to global party guest. Trip after trip has ended in photo ops
and policy failures. Instead Obama is stuck dumpster diving into the
futile quest for a Palestinian state, not because such an entity will
make the world any better, but because it will make him look
good.

Obama has no mandate at home, and he has even less of one abroad.
America’s enemies do not fear him. Only our allies do. Kim Jong Il does
not sit up nights worrying what Obama will do. Because the consensus in
North Korea, Iran and the rest of the world is that the sea will rise,
the sun will set and Obama will do nothing. Except maybe write a strongly
worded letter, offset by some quiet back channel diplomacy from his
coterie of international left wing stooges reassuring the offender that,
“No, Barry really isn’t mad at you. He’s just concerned. Really, really
concerned.”

Liberal pundits mock the rough and ready style of conservatives like
Reagan, Bush or Palin in world affairs, but what they fail to realize is
that the over-educated naivete, trendy cosmopolitanism and buzzword rich
approach of a Kerry or Obama come off as laughably pathetic on the world
stage. Republicans might be hated, but they can’t be ignored. Democrats
on the other hand are cats paws and pawns, fools who are so sure of their
cleverness and determined to embrace every culture in the way that only
the graduates of Ivy League institutions can, that any Third World vendor
could twirl them around his fingers.

World leaders are rarely liked, but effective ones are respected. And
effective world leaders don’t lead with appeasement, don’t compromise
before the other side has even made an offer and negotiate on behalf of
their country, rather than some intangible global consensus. They
understand that they represent a country, not a popularity contest. They
don’t travel abroad to be adored or be greeted with parades and gifts,
but to achieve tangible results on specific issues. To do otherwise is
not to be a world leader, but a celebrity who happens to have picked up a
big title along the way.

To be a proper American president on the world stage, means choosing to
be respected, rather than liked. Obama always chooses to be liked, rather
than respected. Because respect comes from accomplishment and character,
while ‘liking’ is a function of appearance and image. Aiming to be
‘liked’ is playing to Obama’s strengths. But being liked is irrelevant
outside of an after school special. World affairs is not a networking
seminar, it is a negotiation between countries who have billions of
dollars and millions of lives on the line. And Obama has no idea how to
play that game. Like the kid who never fit in anywhere, he’s still trying
to be liked. And he’s willing to sell out American interests and allies
to get the cool UN kids to like him.


Unfortunately Obama’s irrelevance is also America’s irrelevance. A
Republican House of Representatives cannot do what Obama should be doing.
And any attempt to show strength gets shouted down by the liberal
punditocracy as treason and undermining the White House. As if anyone,
anywhere could undermine Obama internationally as much as he undermines
himself. The same liberals who considered Ted Kennedy’s treasonous offer
of cooperation with the Soviet Union or Kerry’s trip to Latin American
Marxist terrorists to be acts of courage, damn Republicans who supported
allies in Ecuador and Israel as traitors. And so Obama must have a free
hand to do it all on his own. To do what Kennedy or Kerry could have only
dreamed of.

Obama has lost the world. He has made the country that he claims to
represent into a shadow of its former strength and glory. And his
irrelevance endangers American lives. Not just those of soldiers in war
zones, laboring under restrictive Rules of Engagement, written so as not
to offend Muslims. Not just those of Americans at risk for domestic
terrorism under an Attorney General who sympathizes with terrorists, more
than with Americans. But to everyone living in a world where countries
like North Korea and Iran feel free to do what they want, where our
economic rivals such as Russia and China advance their interests and
their espionage, and where terrorists across the Muslim world grow in
boldness and number because they have no one left to fear anymore. In
America and around the world­ Barack Hussein Obama endangers us all.




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