Our main political concern at Urgent Agenda is always with foreign and defense policy. As the saying goes, you can survive four years of a bad domestic policy, but four years of a bad foreign policy can be fatal. President Bush, with all his failings, kept us safe, and he put the United States first.
But President Obama?
The first signals are troubling. There seems to be a new concession every day, and a kind of college-level naiveté about the world. First-class reporter Benny Avni, who is based at the UN, examines the Obama attitude toward Russia, and finds it wanting:
“QUIETLY, the Obama administration is offering Russia a tacit bargain: We’ll concede to your hegemony in your immediate neighborhood - if you cooperate with the West in increasing the pressure on Iran.”
I’m sure our East European allies are loving it. You can almost hear them chanting, “Bring back Bush!”
“President George W. Bush publicly criticized Moscow after it swallowed parts of pro-Western Georgia, as well as other incursions in a region that Russia calls its ‘near abroad.’ Even more significant, Bush angered Moscow by signing agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic to deploy a missile-shield system near Russia’s borders.”
And a proud moment it was.
“The Bush administration argued that such a shield is designed to protect everyone in the region…but the Russians still saw the missile-shield deployment as a threat to them.
“So the Obama administration (many of whose top figures consider a missile shield a sci-fi fantasy anyway) is signaling that the program may be dropped.”
It isn’t a fantasy. It’s an increasingly workable system.
“The Poles, a loyal US ally, can’t be happy. They fear a return to the bad old days when Moscow dominated their region. Nor could the Czech foreign minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, have been pleased when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised similar thoughts when they met him in Washington recently.”
But, hey, who are they compared to our good friends, the Russians?
“A Western diplomat stationed in central Europe told me last week that many of his colleagues are receiving new instructions to avoid confrontation with Russia over such issues as its grab last year of Georgian provinces South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Those instructions are inspired by a new American policy, he said.
“But the diplomat was skeptical that such overtures would work to turn Moscow’s policies on Iran around…
…”‘The Russians will probably pocket whatever concession you give them and then continue to block any sanctions against Iran,’ the diplomat predicted.”
Incredible, but diplomats of other nations are tougher on Russia than is our own government, now that it’s in the hands of The One. And we must begin to recall Mr. Obama’s associations with left-wing radicals through most of his life.
“The new line certainly hasn’t paid off so far. Moscow has welcomed Obama’s reevaluation of relations, but then turned around and maneuvered Kyrgyzstan into kicking the US military out of bases crucial to operations in Afghanistan. And, yes, Russia welcomes any rethinking of missile shield, but ‘our stance on the Iranian nuclear program has no elements which could be interpreted as toughening of approach,’ Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said last week.
“And so a very clever bargain floated by Washington’s so-called foreign policy ‘realists’ (and adopted by an Obama administration intent on erasing Bush’s idealistic ‘neo-con’ policies) is facing a huge test. Will reality undermine the realists?”
Even if it does, the in-the-tank media may spin the story in Obama’s direction. And the American people, concerned about the dwindling economy, may not care. During the great Depression, foreign policy was the furthest thing from their minds.
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