American Prestige in Decline

American Prestige in Decline

What a mess!

As the prestige of America declines conflicts in all parts of the world accelerate. Russia is threatening an actual – as opposed to a proxy – invasion of the Ukraine. The entire Middle East is on fire and substantial portions of Africa are falling to the same form of conflicts. Several Central American countries, with the aid and assistance of American taxpayer funded advocacy groups are exporting their children to America swamping our facilities and overtaxing our welfare programs. China and North Korea have become so aggressive that pacifist Japan is beginning to re-arm and Viet Nam – once a client state of China – is now engaged in military confrontations in the South China Sea.

The August 7 edition of The Wall Street Journal contained the stunning article that Israel and Egypt had shunned American participation in an effort to repress the terrorist activities of Hamas:

“The U.S. encouraged Israel and Egypt to forge a close security partnership. What Washington never anticipated was that the two countries would come to trust each other more than the Americans, who would watch events in Gaza unfold largely from the sidelines as the Israelis and the Egyptians planned out their next steps.” [Emphasis supplied]In addition to a shared concern about a terrorist state on their borders, the leaders of Israel and Egypt shared another common bond – they had been treated like “red headed step children” by President Barack Obama. In the past, Mr. Obama had been so dismissive of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he dropped a series of demands on Mr. Netanyahu and walked out of a meeting to have dinner with his wife and children in the residence portion of the White House. Mr. Obama threatened to cut of financial and military aid to Egypt when then-Field Marshal, now President, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi deposed then-President Mohammed Morsi after Mr. Morsi and the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood brutalized dissenters in a series of riots and retaliations. So distrustful of Mr. Obama and his Administration are the leaders of Israel and Egypt they froze Secretary of State John Kerry and Mr. Obama out of any negotiations involving Hamas and Gaza.

“U.S. officials, who tried to intervene in the initial days after the conflict broke out on July 8 to try to find a negotiated solution, soon realized that Mr. Netanyahu’s office wanted to run the show with Egypt and to keep the Americans at a distance, according to U.S., European and Israeli officials.“The Americans, in turn, felt betrayed by what they saw as a series of “mean spirited” leaks, which they interpreted as a message from Mr. Netanyahu that U.S. involvement was neither welcomed nor needed.”

Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry were forced to learn of the first negotiated cease-fire on Twitter.

So bad is our standing in the world that tiny Netherlands – population just under 17 Million – has just told us to “pound sand” over a deportation request involving suspected narco-terrorist Jugo Carvajal Barrios. Monday’s Wall Street Journal carried the following article (excerpted):

“The Netherlands’ July 27 decision to return a former director of Venezuela’s military intelligence—who had been detained in Aruba—to Caracas, rather than fulfill the extradition request of the Obama administration, is a blow to U.S. prestige.“It is also a major setback in the fight against terrorism in the Americas.

“In 2008 the U.S. Treasury designated Hugo Carvajal Barrios a drug “kingpin” for “materially assisting the narcotics trafficking activities” of the FARC, a Colombian terrorist organization. Treasury alleges that he not only protected cocaine shipments but also supplied the guerrillas with weapons and official documents to travel in and out of Venezuela.

“Yet it’s not surprising that the Netherlands decided it would be less costly to be on the good side of the bad guys than to be on the bad side of the good guys. After six years of the Obama global retreat, any leader would be crazy to expect the U.S. to go to the mat for an ally, even one that stuck its neck out for Uncle Sam. So when Venezuela threatened military and economic retribution at the Netherlands Antilles if Carvajal was extradited, the Dutch foreign affairs minister relented. [Emphasis supplied]

The article goes on to describe Carvajal’s participation in “massacring civilians, kidnapping and torturing police officers, and blanketing rural areas with land mines that maim peasants” conducted by the Hugo C havez regime in Venezuela. The pressure by Venezuela to protect Mr. Carvajal from deportation to America is not only a demonstration of the complicity of the corrupt regimes of Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, but a shining example of how far we have fallen under Mr. Obama.

Even Mr. Obama’s supporters in Washington have turned on him. Monday’s Wall Street Journal noted the following:

“The latest reviews of Barack Obama’s foreign policy are in, and flattering they are not. “Just leaves you scratching your head,” says one, about the President’s rationale for providing limited support to the Kurds in Iraq. “Nothing we can point to that’s been very successful,” says another about the President’s policy in Syria.“And then there’s this zinger: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

“In case you are wondering which trio of neoconservative naysayers we’re quoting here, we refer you, respectively, to James Steinberg, formerly the President’s Deputy Secretary of State, and Robert Ford, formerly his Ambassador to Syria, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, formerly his loyal Secretary of State.”

And while it may be instructive to hear the criticisms from Mssrs. Steinberg and Ford, the comments from Ms. Clinton should be taken for what they are – political posturing. After all, let’s remember that, according to Robert Gates in his recent book Duty, Ms. Clinton, in front of Mr. Gates, acknowledged to Mr. Obama that her opposition to President George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq had been “political posturing” in her campaign against Mr. Obama for the Democrat nomination. One can safely assume that Ms. Clinton’s current criticism is likewise “political posturing” in a likely presidential run in 2016. At the very least she did not feel strongly enough about her views to air them publicly or to submit her resignation in protest as others have done.

And finally in an editorial in Tuesday edition, WSJ opined:

“The world has often disappointed President Obama, and perhaps no more so than over his dream of nuclear-free humanity. Witness the irony that the Obama Administration has finally admitted that Russia is violating the Reagan-era INF treaty, supposedly the very model of modern arms control.“The Norwegian Nobel committee probably won’t rescind the 2009 peace prize it awarded Mr. Obama for his “vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” But the dream is in tatters. In its annual compliance report on disarmament agreements last week, the State Department for the first time declared Russia in breach of the 1987 accord.

“The proper reaction is, what took so long? The first reports of Russian testing of a banned mid-range missile came six years ago. U.S. officials have since said that the Russians have worked on three different types of cruise missiles able to fly 500 to 5,500 kilometers, which are prohibited by the INF.

“The Administration didn’t inform the Senate of these violations during the 2010 ratification debate for Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal, New Start. Seventy-one Senators voted for the treaty without having the facts.”

That is vintage policy for Mr. Obama – operating on the naivete that rogue administrations can be trusted and then suppressing facts that would contradict his preferred narrative.

Let’s be sure that we understand what is happening on the international scene. It is not that people of other nations have come to love or hate America more under Mr. Obama. What has happened is that the leaders of those nations have lost respect for the leader of our nation and have concluded that Mr. Obama is untrustworthy with regard to promises and feckless with regard to threats.

In the end this is our fault – well not my fault since I didn’t vote for my Obama either time. We – I mean you – elected a man without a single accomplishment to his name other than being elected or appointed to one succeeding office after another. It begins as far back as his selection as Editor-in Chief of the Harvard Law Review – one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation. The principle role of the editor-in-chief- is to write and publish the premier law review article for that year. Mr. Obama became the only person in Harvard’s history to neither write nor publish such a scholarly dissertation. He had no accomplishments as a lawyer, instead retreating to the safe world of “community organizer” where there are no marks for success or failure. He had no accomplishments as a state legislator in Illinois, instead voting “present” on most controversial pieces of legislation with the exception of a single bill that would allow a doctor to murder an infant born alive during an abortion – Mr. Obama was the single vote in favor of such a ghoulish piece of legislation. He had not a single accomplishment as a United States senator. And his singular “positive” accomplishment as President is the passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which is the product of lies, withholding of information, and startling ineptitude in implementation. Beyond Obamacare Mr. Obama has botched virtually everything he has touched, foreign and domestic. So consistent or his errors and failures that Congressional Democrats asked him to stay out of negotiations for immigration reform – no wonder Mssrs. Netanyahu and al Sisi froze him out of dealings with Hamas and Gaza.

Virtually all of this was discoverable about Mr. Obama before his first election and yet no one asked the hard questions. We – I mean you – elected a blank slate upon which you wrote your hopes and aspirations. Unfortunately that “blank slate” lacked the ability to fulfill either of them.

And as we head into the next presidential election, will we – I mean you – make the same mistake? Ms. Clinton has a lifetime of appointments and elections to honors and offices – mostly due to her marriage to President Bill Clinton – without a signifigant accomplishment. Her time as Secretary of State is instructive – she could not name a single accomplishment herself and now finds it necessary to “revise” her support of the very catastrophic failures that mark Mr. Obama’s sorrowful legacy.

Don’t be fooled again.