5 Years in, and now the Washington Post is worried that the Smartest Man in the World might be living in Fantasy-land?

Washington Post says "President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy."

President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy

By Editorial Board, Published: March 2

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”//

And:

But it’s also true that, as long as some leaders play by what Mr. Kerry dismisses as 19th-century rules, the United States can’t pretend that the only game is in another arena altogether. Military strength, trustworthiness as an ally, staying power in difficult corners of the world such as Afghanistan — these still matter, much as we might wish they did not. While the United States has been retrenching, the tide of democracy in the world, which once seemed inexorable, has been receding. In the long run, that’s harmful to U.S. national security, too.

As Mr. Putin ponders whether to advance further — into eastern Ukraine, say — he will measure the seriousness of U.S. and allied actions, not their statements. China, pondering its next steps in the East China Sea, will do the same. Sadly, that’s the nature of the century we’re living in.

It is a good thing that we have a Nobel Prize winner rather than that cowboy...

...or are potential allies would be laughing at us.

English laugh at Obama's "delusions of grandeur" in comparing Syria to World War II.

Which ties perfectly in to Victor Davis Hanson's observations:

1) His inclination is to damn straw men, blame others for his self-inflicted errors, and spike the ball when he should keep quiet and become modest (cf. the bin Laden raid). So in Syria we heard the same old, same old: A host of bad guys, here and abroad, wants to do nothing. Obama alone has the vision and moral compass to restore global and U.S. credibility through his eloquence; but the world disappointed him and is now at fault for establishing red lines that it won’t enforce: He came into the world to save the world, but the world rejected him.

After five years of this, the world caught on, and sees juvenile and narcissistic petulance in lieu of statesmanship—and unfortunately a sinister Putin takes great delight in reminding 7 billion people of this fact almost daily. In terms of geostrategic clout, Obama has nullified the power of his eleven aircraft-carrier battle groups, Putin through his shrewd insight and ruthless calculation of human nature, has added five where they didn’t exist.

2) Obama thinks in an untrained manner and for all the talk of erudition and education seems bored and distracted—and it shows up in the most critical moments. Had he wished to stop authoritarians, prevent bloodshed and near genocide, and foster true reform in the Middle East, there were plenty of prior, but now blown occasions: a) the “good” war in Afghanistan could have earned his full attention; b) the “bad” Iraq War was won and needed only a residual force to monitor the Maliki government and protect Iraq airspace and ensure quiet; c) the green revolution in Iran was in need of moral support; d) Qaddafi could have been continually pressured for further reform rather than bombed into oblivion; e) postwar Libya needed U.S. leadership to ensure that “lead from behind” did not lead to the present version of Somalia and the disaster in Benghazi; e) long ago, the president could have either kept quiet about Syria or acted on his threats when Assad was tottering and the resistance was less Islamist; f) he could have warned the one vote/one time Muslim Brotherhood early on not to do what everyone in the world knew it would surely do; g) he need not have issued tough serial deadlines to Iran that we have not really enforced and probably have no intention of enforcing.

It's a good thing that we have a Nobel Prize winner instead of that cowboy!

Obama fails to persuade G-20 leaders to support him on Syria.

Romney was laughed at last year for arguing that Detroit should be allowed to go bankrupt and that Russia was a threat...

....who is laughing now?

Many observers found this fixation strange, and Democrats tried to turn it into a punchline. A New York Times editorial in March of last year said Romney’s assertions regarding Russia represented either “a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics.” And in an October debate, Obama sarcastically mocked his opponent’s Russia rhetoric. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” the president quipped at the time.

That line still chafes Robert O’Brien, a Los Angeles lawyer and friend of Romney’s who served as a foreign policy adviser.

“Everyone thought, Oh my goodness that is so clever and Mitt’s caught in the Cold War and doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” O’Brien said. “Well guess what. With all of these foreign policy initiatives — Syria, Iran, [Edward] Snowden — who’s out there causing problems for America? It’s Putin and the Russians.”

Indeed, earlier this summer, Moscow defiantly refused to extradite National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to the United States, prompting Obama to cancel a meeting he had scheduled with Putin during the Group of 20 summit. Russia has blocked United Nations action against Syria. And on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told lawmakers that Russia was one of the countries supplying Syria with chemical weapons.

This is so sad.

It's like he expects everyone to act like the American media.

//President Obama told reporters in Sweden Wednesday that he never “set a red line” when it came to deciding to intervene militarily in Syria.

That claim directly contradicts Obama’s remarks in August of last year, when he announced his “red line” for action in Syria during a White House press conference.//

Too good not to post:

Glen Reynolds writes:

//JAMES TARANTO: Obama’s Cakewalk: The Syria debacle and the lessons of Iraq.

The appeal of Barack Obama in 2008 lay not only in his status as the only serious Democratic candidate to have opposed the war from the outset, but also in the belief that his conciliatory rhetoric, along with his “multicultural” identity (black, with Muslim ancestors and an Arabic middle name to boot!) would “restore our moral standing,” as the future president put it in his nomination speech, and usher in “a new beginning,” as he announced in Cairo in June 2009.

Obama’s supporters would now have us believe that his swaggering words are as powerful as his soothing ones were supposed to have been. . . .

This is an example of magical thinking that is not wishful. It would indeed be a big tactical mistake for Assad either to attack U.S. forces or again to use chemical weapons while congressional action is pending. But that is because of Obama’s political weakness, not his rhetorical strength. Congressional assent to Obama’s request for military authorization is far from assured; if Assad wants to keep it that way, he will lie low as the debate plays out.

Read the whole thing, including his section on how Obama’s flipflopped. Oh, heck, here’s the best bit:

These past statements indict the president for hypocrisy, but they do not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. In his defense one might claim that his moral sensibility has matured over the past six years. Perhaps, that is, he has grown in office–though he has not grown nearly enough by other measures that one can say he is up to the job.

Unless in the next week or so he discovers a heretofore unrealized capacity to move public opinion on substantive matters of policy, the expedient thing for lawmakers of either party to do will be to vote “no” while smugly minimizing the moral stakes by noting that while Assad is of course “a bad guy,” he poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, the Syrian economy is in shambles, there are lots of other mass-murdering dictators and we can’t bomb ‘em all, and so forth.

Any opportunistic lawmaker who takes that path will be following the example set by the man who is now president of the United States.

Ouch.//

It's a good thing we have a Nobel Prize winner for president and not that cowboy...

...or Putin could be considered the "moderate" in the Middle East.

Oh, wait...

If you still doubt that Barack Obama has disastrously bungled our foreign policy, check out this video. In it Egyptian singer Salma Elmasry brutally insults Obama for supporting the Muslim Brothers and Islamists in general, her vulgar insults laced with an image of our President sporting a bin Laden cap and beard, and another of him with thickened nose and lips, no surprise to anyone familiar with traditional Arab racism. Meanwhile, Russian president Vladimir Putin is on his way to Cairo. According to Debka, “Putin hopes to come away from Cairo as champion of the war on radical Islam in two important Arab countries and the most reliable ally of forces for moderation.” Next on his itinerary is Tehran, where “the Russian leader will use the double exposure to underscore Moscow’s solid presence at the power centers of the Middle East – in striking contrast to Washington.”

Things are pretty bad internationally when Putin, the butcher of Muslim Cechnyans, is seen as a “moderate,” and the enabler of genocidal Iran and Syria a stauncher warrior against jihadist terror than the land of the free that lost 3000 citizens and billions of dollars on 9/11. That’s how badly Obama has damaged our interests and security, squandered the capital of our international prestige, and in general made everything worse.

So, Obama alienated Eastern Europe, he's being talked down to by Africans, and the Middle East now considers him allied with the radicals.

At least we still have China!

But Geo-politics doesn't matter!  Our president has a Nobel Peace Prize!

This is not good news but it is a nice turn of phrase:

Western politicians who struggle to under­stand Vladimir Putin should bin intelligence reports and buy some good biographies of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Nicholas I. Putin is a classical Russian nationalist; his rule is autocratic (to the gratification of the majority of his subjects) and he has re-forged the historical alliance between the government and the Orthodox Church by imposing socially conservative laws and repressing the homosexual-rights intifada. Like Catherine the Great and Tsar Paul he has Mediterranean ambitions. Unlike them, he faces negligible opposition from a bankrupt European Union and a geopolitical illiterate in the Oval Office who makes Jimmy Carter resemble Bismarck. We should not be surprised if, by the time the EU collapses, the Mediterranean has become a Russian lake.

Well, he is a Nobel Prize winner...


....so he is obviously really smart:

It is simply astonishing that the leader of the free world would agree to speak against a backdrop of a murderous terrorist with American and Israeli blood on his hands. What kind of message does this send to America’s enemies when the president of the United States gives a press conference standing in front of a banner celebrating one of the most brutal terrorists in history? It projects a clear signal that Washington is weak in the face of terrorism, and it is an insult to the memory of those who died at the hands of Arafat’s terror network.

While the Obama White House prides itself on having an extremely slick campaign operation, its ineptness and insensitivity in government, not least on the world stage, can be staggering. President Obama, for example, could not even pronounce the name of Burmese freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi on his recent visit to Rangoon, referring to her several times as Aung YAN Suu Kyi. He also famously called the Falkland Islands "the Maldives", and succeeded in offending the whole of Polandwhen he referred to a "Polish death camp" in World War Two.  As I’ve noted in previous pieces, President Obama’s first term was littered with embarrassing gaffes abroad, and it looks like his second term will be more of the same. This is in many respects an amateurish presidency, headed by a president who is frequently out of his depth on the world stage, and all too willing to appease America’s adversaries.

Hope and Change...

...and smart diplomacy.

Obama less popular in Middle East than Bush in his final years.

Smart Diplomacy - Obama unilaterally downgrades Egypt from "ally" status, maybe.

Video: NBC chief foreign correspondent blasts Obama’s “Egypt not an ally” statement.

Richard Engel expresses shock at Mr. Obama's confusion about Egypt's status and asks if supporting the Arab Spring was worth it.

Orwell Time.

Add this to the "Bust of Churchill" as part of the Obama administration's approach to sending uncomfortable bits of history down the "memory hole."

The Obama administration refuses to say what it considers to be the capital of Israel.

The videos are painful:



And it gets worse:



But here is Obama in 2008 stating that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel:



And, by the way, that last video where Obama says that nothing has been done since 2002 about Iran's nuclear program seems pretty applicable in 2012.

November can't come soon enough...

...Obama proposes to give away more American sovereignity.

A critical document from President Barack Obama's free trade negotiations with eight Pacific nations was leaked online early Wednesday morning, revealing that the administration intends to bestow radical new political powers upon multinational corporations, contradicting prior promises.

The leaked document has been posted on the website of Public Citizen, a long-time critic of the administration's trade objectives. The new leak follows substantial controversy surrounding the secrecy of the talks, in which some members of Congress have complained they are not being given the same access to trade documents that corporate officials receive.

"The outrageous stuff in this leaked text may well be why U.S. trade officials have been so extremely secretive about these past two years of [trade] negotiations," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch in a written statement.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has been so incensed by the lack of access as to introduce legislation requiring further disclosure. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has gone so far as to leak a separate document from the talks on his website. Other Senators are considering writing a letter to Ron Kirk, the top trade negotiator under Obama, demanding more disclosure.

The newly leaked document is one of the most controversial of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. It addresses a broad sweep of regulations governing international investment and reveals the Obama administration's advocacy for policies that environmental activists, financial reform advocates and labor unions have long rejected for eroding key protections currently in domestic laws.

Under the agreement currently being advocated by the Obama administration, American corporations would continue to be subject to domestic laws and regulations on the environment, banking and other issues. But foreign corporations operating within the U.S. would be permitted to appeal key American legal or regulatory rulings to an international tribunal. That international tribunal would be granted the power to overrule American law and impose trade sanctions on the United States for failing to abide by its rulings.

After Poland "pimp-slaps" the Nobel Prize-winning "smartest guy in the world," it's Denmark's turn to ridicule Obama.

Denmark!?!?!?!?!?

It's beginning to look like Obama has single-handedly undermined our alliance...with Europe?!?!?!?!

Actually, this is pretty funny stuff.



Via Mark Shea.

What is there about Howdy-Barry that doesn't say "Leader of the Most Powerful Nation on Earth"?

How much has your diplomatic currency been devalued when Poland "pimp-slaps" you?

Poland dresses Obama down over "Polish death camp" comment:

US President Barack Obama's description of a Nazi German Holocaust site as a "Polish death camp" shocked Poland, whose leaders insist the record be set straight 67 years after World War II.

Obama on Tuesday labeled the Nazi facility used to process Jews for extermination as a "Polish death camp." The White House later said the president "misspoke" and expressed "regret".

The linguistic faux pas overshadowed Obama's posthumous award of the highest US civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to Jan Karski, a former Polish underground officer who provided early eyewitness accounts of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews.

Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Wednesday Obama's words had hurt all Poles and he expected more from Washington than just "regret".

"I am convinced that our American friends can today allow themselves a stronger reaction than a simple expression of regret from the White House spokesman -- a reaction more inclined to eliminate once and for all these kinds of errors," Tusk told reporters in Warsaw.

"Today, this is a problem for the reputation of the United States," the prime minister said.

Is this the beginning of payback for pulling the rug out from under Eastern Europe on missile defense?

The Empty Suit Presidency.

This is the greatest politician in American History???

Obama in Colombia: ‘Part of My Job Is to Scout Out Where I May Want to Bring Michelle Back Later for Vacation’

Obama has a natural "tin ear" when it comes to making seemingly off the cuff - albeit actually scripted - public statements such as when he insulted the Irish Prime Minister by suggesting that Irishmen were drunks or when he insulted the French president by calling him ugly or when he said that a fallen soldier was alive or when he signalled to the band to play God save the Queen and then began his toast to the Queen (which was the same 2011 trip that he signed a guest book indicating that he thought he was signing it in "2008" or when he turned over a press conference to Bill Clinton or when he took lavish vacations during a recession that caused European - but not American - media to say WTF?

Or this great moment in presidential history:

Doesn't this guy have a protocol secretary?

Look, I might do this myself, but presumably if I were the President, I'd have some expert in protocol to clue me in about social niceties:

President Obama came, he saw, he insulted.


“Obama insults Sarkozy,” blared the headline on one French website, taking umbrage at Mr. Obama’s wayward remark at the G-20 summit here about the physical appearance of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Mr. Obama thought he was making a gentle joke about Mr. Sarkozy, host of the summit, when he congratulated Mr. Sarkozy and wife Carla Bruni on the birth of their baby daughter on Oct. 19. Instead, Mr. Obama caused a minor international incident.

“I want to make mention that this is our first meeting since the arrival of the newest Sarkozy, and so I want to congratulate Nicolas and Carla on the birth of Giulia,” Mr. Obama told reporters shortly after his arrival at the G-20, with Mr. Sarkozy at his side. “And I informed Nicolas on the way in that I am confident that Giulia inherited her mother’s looks rather than her father’s, which I think is an excellent thing.”

He added, “And so now we share one of the greatest challenges and blessings of life, and that is being fathers to our daughters.”

Mr. Sarkozy, who is said to be very conscious about his looks, did not appear greatly amused by the comment, and some observers who attended the meeting said Mr. Obama’s remark fell flat.

The French president, who has three sons from two previous marriages, later told reporters, “You see the great influence of Barack Obama. It’s been four years now he tells me to be a father of girls is fantastic, he has two. So I listened and followed his example.”

But Mr. Obama’s remarks, intended as a compliment for the French president’s glamorous wife, ended up in the eyes of some Frenchmen as tagging their leader as an ugly man. France took notice.

“The U.S. President’s picnic on the ‘physical’ of his French counterpart is only the latest episode of reports [which are] rather cool at best, at worst frankly tense,” said L’Observateur newspaper, which called the two leaders “the best enemies.”

Another French publication said Mr. Obama had chosen to compliment Mr. Sarkozy “in a way unique to say the least, before the cameras around the world.”

The French celebrity website Staragora said Mr. Obama’s comment was “risky” and “not very cool, for the French president [was] humiliated in public.”

“Barack Obama has openly and publicly ridiculed the physical [appearance of] Nicolas Sarkozy,” Staragora said, adding that Mr. Obama’s comments were delivered “without pity.”

The Ramadan Massacre.

According to the Washington Post, Syria began a massacre of its citizens on the eve of Ramadan - which a month holy in Islam, when Christians are not permitted to engage in military actions against Muslims:

And yet that is what Mr. Assad is doing. Early on Sunday, army troops led by tanks launched an assault on the city of 800,000 from four directions, firing cannon and machine guns indiscriminately at the unarmed residents manning street barricades. Video clips posted on YouTube showed the tanks blasting at the minarets of mosques in a city known for its Sunni conservatism, while snipers picked off people on the streets.

The attack began on the eve of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, and continued on Monday. It’s not known how many people have died; foreign journalists and other independent observers have been kept out of Hama. But Syrian opposition sources reported at least 55 deaths on Sunday, and by Monday some counts exceeded 100.


The attack reflects Mr. Assad’s desperation; the regime appears to see no way to save itself other than by waging war on the civilian population. But Mr. Assad clearly is also calculating that those who suppose that dictators can no longer get away with massacres are wrong. He has some basis for that conclusion: NATO may have intervened in Libya to prevent the slaughter of civilians by Moammar Gaddafi, but Western leaders have publicly and vehemently ruled out intervention in Libya. The U.N. Security Council has failed to speak out against Mr. Assad’s assaults on other cities, as has the Arab League.

And:

Mr. Obama promised that “in the days ahead, the United States will continue to increase our pressure on the Syrian regime.” But we have heard that before. On June 17, administration officials gave reporters a briefing in which they used those same words and talked about such measures as sanctions against Syria’s oil and gas sector and the referral of Mr. Assad and his collaborators to the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges. Nothing has happened since then. Is it any wonder that Mr. Assad thinks he can slaughter the people of Hama with impunity?

It's strange to hear this kind of criticism of the President from the Washington Post; it seems that they want more aggressive, unilateral action from the Noble Peace Prize winner.

Is the President voting "present" on this?

Turncoat Nation.

Bill Whittle, again. This time it is about connecting the dots in Obama's foreign policy, which involves selling out our allies, supporting dictators and undermining democracies.  It's an impressive list that we forget at our costs, including selling out Poland and the Czek Republic on missile defense and giving the Russians the secret codes for Britain's missiles, never mind advocating that Israel return to pre-1967 borders.



Whittle recommends this Victor Davis Hanson's e-book - How The Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security.

Obama - improving America's relationships with its allies.

The Czech Republic pulls out of missile defense plan:

Count the Czech Republic out of any American missile-defense system in Europe. The Czechs formally withdrew from the missile-defense partnership with the US, prompting one lawmaker in Prague to complain that “the current administration doesn’t take the Czech Republic seriously.” They see the Obama administration as more concerned with appeasing Russia — at their expense