Below is a very brief excerpt from a NATIONAL REVIEW article that highlights what we have been saying for months. Obama is viewed around the world as a weak and naive President and his dangerous assumptions have put this country at great risk.

The notion that other countries and especially dictatorships can be swayed from persuing their national interests by a charm offensive is silly. Obama will only be able to infuence world events because America is perceived as strong and determined. Anything less than that will fail……and has failed.

~~John Cronin~~

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDYyYWIwZTkyMjY3MjcxMzc4Njc5MjNjODc3NTc1Yzg=

Confronting Iran and Afghanistan

By Conrad Black

Richard Nixon was able to build a relationship with China only after that country’s relations with the USSR had descended to the verge of war, the U.S. had effected an almost complete withdrawal from Vietnam without bringing down the non-Communist government in Saigon, and all unusual political unrest in the U.S. had subsided. President Truman was able to set up a functioning Western Alliance when the U.S. was, as Mr. Churchill stated, all that stood in the way of Stalin’s occupation of Western Europe. The United States has not been strong in the world since the debacle of Iraqi nation-building, in about 2005, after which almost the entire U.S. ground-forces conventional military capability has been mired in the Near East, while harebrained bipartisan economic policy has colossally indebted the country.

Mr. Obama had little chance of achieving any of his ambitious targets on the world stage until the U.S. was again objectively strong, if then. At a minimum, this would require the end of the terminal current-account deficits, the emergence of a robust and sensibly based economy, and a satisfactory de-escalation of the Afghan and Iraqi commitments. There is cause for hope on the first point, great hope on the last, but only elemental progress on the economy, which is battered by the specter of a decade of trillion-dollar annual federal budget deficits and ludicrous distractions of health care and energy-use extravagance. The idea that the world and America could be remade on the strength of the Obama brand was just an effusion of wild egotism and naïveté that has sullied the brand. Little could be achieved and little has been.

Tags: Afghanistan, China, Churchill, Iran, National Review, Obama, Truman, Western Europe

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