President of The World Losing Support There Also
By
Monty Pelerin, posted December 1st, 2009 http://www.economicnoise.com/2009/12/01/president-of-the-world-losing-support-there-also/
Some quotes from Peter Wehner’s piece:
It’s “amateur hour at the White House,” according to Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former official in the Carter administration.
“Not only are things not getting fixed, they may be getting
more broken,” according to Michael Hirsh at Newsweek. When even such
strong Obama supporters as Gelb and Hirsh reach these conclusions, you
know things must be unraveling.
Peter Wehner – 11.30.2009 – 11:17 AM
The overseas reviews for President Obama’s foreign policy are
starting to pour in — and they’re not favorable. Bob Ainsworth, the
British defense secretary, has blamed Obama for the decline in British
public support for the war in Afghanistan. According to the Telegraph:
Mr. Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly
criticizing the U.S. President and his delays in sending more troops to
bolster the mission against the Taliban. A “period of hiatus” in
Washington — and a lack of clear direction — had made it harder for
ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan
mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said. Senior British
Government sources have become increasingly frustrated with Mr. Obama’s
“dithering” on Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, with several former British defense chiefs echoing the concerns.
The President is “Obama the Impotent,” according to Steven Hill of the Guardian. The Economist calls Obama the “Pacific (and pussyfooting) president.” The Financial Times
refers to “relations between the U.S. and Europe, which started the
year of talks as allies, near breakdown.” The German magazine Der Spiegel accuses the president of being “dishonest with Europe” on the subject of climate change. Another withering piece in Der Spiegel, titled “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage,” lists the instances in which Obama is being rolled. The Jerusalem Post
puts it this way: “Everybody is saying no to the American president
these days. And it’s not just that they’re saying no, it’s also the way
they’re saying no.” “He talks too much,” a Saudi academic
who had once been smitten with Barack Obama tells the Middle East
scholar Fouad Ajami. The Saudi “has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does
not bother with the Obama oratory,” according to Ajami. But “he is
hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and
in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of
disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down
to earth.”
Indeed he has — and only Obama and his increasingly clueless administration seem unaware of this.
On almost every front, progress is nonexistent. In many instances,
things are getting worse rather than better. The enormous goodwill that
Obama’s election was met with hasn’t been leveraged into anything
useful and tangible. Rather, our allies are now questioning America’s
will, while our adversaries are becoming increasingly emboldened. The
United States looks weak and uncertain. It’s “amateur hour at the White
House,” according to Leslie Gelb,
president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former
official in the Carter administration. “Not only are things not getting
fixed, they may be getting more broken,” according to Michael Hirsh at Newsweek. When even such strong Obama supporters as Gelb and Hirsh reach these conclusions, you know things must be unraveling.
It’s no mystery as to why. President Obama’s approach to
international relations is simplistic and misguided. It is premised on
the belief that American concessions to our adversaries will beget
goodwill and concessions in return; that American self-abasement is
justified; that the American decline is inevitable (and in some
respects welcome); and that diplomacy and multilateralism are ends
rather than means to an end.
Right now the overwhelming issue on the public’s mind is the
economy, where Obama is also having serious problems. But
national-security issues matter a great deal, and they remain the
unique responsibility of the president. With every passing month,
Barack Obama looks more and more like his Democratic predecessor Jimmy
Carter: irresolute, unsteady, and overmatched. The president and
members of his own party will find out soon enough, though, that Obama
the Impotent isn’t what they had in mind when they elected him. We are
witnessing the unmasking, and perhaps the unmaking, of Barack Obama.