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On the foreign policy front at least, what Obama has delivered is a change from remaining strong against America’s enemies; a change from standing firmly beside our allies, and a change from recognizing that the rights of individuals supersede the rights of governments.
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| Eight months into the Obama presidency – as cap and trade languishes in the Congress, health care reform suffers the slings and arrows of a “racist,” “astroturf” opposition and Americans continue to stubbornly cling to their guns and religion – it’s hard to give much credence to the President’s election night pronouncement that “change has come to America.”
It was always a shallow notion. Saying that voters who elect an opposition party want “change” is like saying that restaurant patrons want food. It may be true, but it tells you nothing specific about what you need to do to satisfy that desire.
Improbably enough, it turns out that Americans still think that freedom is more important than irredeemable promises of security. They still think that constitutional limits mean something. And they still think that a federal government that does little more than defend our shores and deliver the mail is (at least half) a good idea.
But if change hasn’t yet come to America, it has certainly been felt in the nations that never had the pleasure of casting a ballot for Barack Obama.
Let’s turn first to Latin America. There, the President has gone to great lengths to pacify Castro’s Cuba, even pushing for the island nation’s entrance into the Organization of American States despite its long history of human rights abuses. He has embraced Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as a friend despite the dictator’s continued attempts to partner with other rogue nations and his forceful suppression of the country’s free press. And he has cast his lot with an exiled Honduran president who sought to use Chavez-style tactics to systematically dismantle the Central American nation’s constitution.
In Europe, the President’s track record doesn’t look much better. He has revoked the protection of missile defense that he promised to the people of Poland and the Czech Republic as recently as six months ago, giving newfound courage to a rapidly weaponizing Iran and a revanchist Russia. He has needled our allies in Germany and France about adopting economic stimulus plans that look like his own while ignoring that our friends in Western Europe are actually enjoying a quicker economic recovery in the wake of their decision to act with fiscal prudence. And he has touted the glories of Russia’s claim to “great power” status while dismissing American exceptionalism as mindless political chauvinism.
In the Middle East, Obama has handled the Israeli government so roughly that his popularity ratings are in the single digits amongst the population of one of America’s most evergreen allies. He has turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the most dramatic act of civic revolt against Iran’s vicious theocracy in decades. And he has intentionally obscured the needs of American forces in Afghanistan in order to delay a tough political decision.
Finally, in Asia, President Obama has rewarded the North Korean regime for sentencing two American journalists to 12 years of hard labor by giving a fading Kim Jong Il a photo-op with a former president. He has virtually ignored our allies in India despite that nation’s vital role in ensuring a peaceful future for the continent. And he has fundamentally shaken the faith of the Chinese in an economic partnership with the U.S. by laying the predicate for a dramatic weakening of the dollar and imposing stiff tariffs on tires – tariffs that are already precariously close to launching a trade war.
As many of Obama’s critics noted during the 2008 campaign, “change” is an amoral word. Taken alone, it neither instructs nor illuminates. A fair conjecture about voters’ intentions in sending Obama to the White House would probably conclude that what the American people wanted was a change from a collapsing economic system; a change from unsustainable (and at times unclear) wars; and a change from the cynical standards that dominate Washington.
But on the foreign policy front at least, what Obama has delivered is a change from remaining strong against America’s enemies; a change from standing firmly beside our allies, and a change from recognizing that the rights of individuals supersede the rights of governments. In short, he has abandoned the moral imperatives of American foreign policy. It turns out he’s changed one more thing too. The old status quo is starting to look a lot better by comparison.
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