With nothing to show for his efforts, Obama's continued belief in his ability to pacify adversaries by personal appeal is as delusional as it is dangerous. Nations don't have personal friends; they have interests. And American interests are not advanced by presidential groveling, but by creating the right mix of carrots and sticks to induce desired behavior.
Obama's willingness to sacrifice embattled allies to appease hostile regimes ultimately weakens America. As Bernard Lewis has said: "A nation can make few mistakes worse than this: to be harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend."
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Reasonably good essay in Jerusalem Post regarding Obama's naive approach to foreign policy which got my attention because the writer makes point I tried to make several months ago and which Obama apologists seem to be in utter denial about - namely, that Obama's personality-centric 'outreach' to problem nations seems to want to believe or assume that their objectives and policies are based on feelings that can be swayed and won over rather than interests that exist outside of an emotional/rhetorical context and need to be countered and contained by a forceful resolve: