Obama in the Turkish Parliament

 

April 9, 2009

   

When President Obama told the Turkish Parliament recently that America was not at war with Islam, and never would be, he was in effect talking to President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Obama’s speech was irresponsible in the extreme, and just the sort of thing that we had feared he would do in his foreign policy. It was capitulation, and it gave a signal to Iran that we would not stand in the way of their uranium enrichment program, their centrifuges, or, indeed, in the way of their nuclear ambitions at all.

   
 

During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, there was a major global shift in power away from America and towards the Soviet Union. This took place because of Carter’s moribund and passive foreign policy, which came to him from his National Security Advisor, Zibigniew Brzezinski. The latter believed that ineluctable, historical changes were occurring, that we were in fact “between two ages,” and that America could not, indeed must not, try to stop those changes. The similarities to Marxist theory are painful.

 

Furthermore, the clear disaster of Carter’s international policy is there for anyone with eyes to see (along with the willingness to do so): Nicaragua went Marxist, spreading that pernicious faith throughout the Latin world; Iran underwent an Islamic-Marxist revolution that still plagues us today, thirty years later; Africa embraced the Soviet Union in several instances; India deepened its involvement with Marxist experiments; Afghanistan went Marxist after being invaded by the Soviet Union; and the Panama canal was given away for a song. All this and more in only four years.

   
 

Unfortunately, Obama seems poised to repeat these types of mistakes. One just cannot publically give away one’s plans, as Obama has, and one just cannot publically adopt so passive a stance in world affairs. America has a responsibility to the captive nations of the world to act as a bulwark, a firewall, against the advance of renegade, rogue regimes such as the Khomeinist one in Tehran. Obama is clearly unfit to lead the world to freedom, since he is at pains to please the implacable enemies of freedom at a time when he should concern himself with implacably promoting the interests of allies such as Israel and Georgia, the latter a staunch friend of America from the New Europe.

   
 

Another example here is Obama’s reaction to North Korea’s launch of a rocket: Obama said in essence that America has to tool down first in order to get others to do the same. This is simply juvenile. If America disarms unilaterally, then that much freedom will exit from the world, that much ability to fight for truth. Criminal regimes are not known for their compliance to agreements that limit either their power or their ambitions.

Negotiation, as stated recently by John Bolton, cannot be an end in itself. At a certain point we must prepare for hostilities, given the demonstrable intransigence of some of those we “engage,” and forget about getting through to them. Thus, Iran is clearly a totalitarian regime with the intention of doing harm, and it can do so quite inexpensively. It is one of the captive nations, and that does not bode well for the rest of us: it will want to extend its realm. To proclaim that we will lay down arms forever is foolish beyond description. It is not that America is the world’s cop, it is rather that America must not leave itself vulnerable when it can easily avoid so doing.

 

The guiding philosophy behind these Carteresque attitudes is first a misguided, watered-down Marxism that believes History is a prewritten script we are working our way through and must obey through submission. Secondly, it’s the overreliance on negotiation, on nuance, as if hostility cannot ever be shown or felt, as if multicultural sensitivity has been proven objectively true (when it hasn’t). Frustratingly, Obama believes we are entering the age of the “post-American world” (just as Fareed Zakaria), and that America should behave as did King Lear: give up power in the name of the wheel of history. But don’t forget what happened to Lear when he did foolishly relinquish all that power: disaster.

   
 

Tony Downing