As an example, consider Richard Engel's undoubtedly uncomfortable exchange on television the other night. in 2009, Engel thought the Most Equal Comrade's Cairo speech was some kind of herald of a new era in Arab-world relations and an address of extraordinary historical significance.
Well, that was then and this is now:
On Thursday’s CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone challenged Richard Engel, NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, to name a country where U.S. relations have improved since Barack Obama took office more than 5 years ago. After hemming and hawing, Engel admitted that he was unable to do so.Video at link.
Now, let's look at the observations of Washington Post columnist (who, for the record is a Pub strategist) Ed Rogers:
I don’t wade into foreign policy much, but I do travel around the world a lot. I regularly interact with foreign leaders, business people and media. In my travels overseas, everyone who voices an opinion believes America is in decline and that Obama is weak. Obviously, they are not partisans, and they usually don’t talk about America’s decline with delight. Most are reacting with anguish and worry. The rest of the world relies on America more than this president seems to realize.No one thinks America is stronger today than it was five years ago. Period.
The term "disconnect" has taken on a buzzword banality, but this is a case in which that's unfortunate, because it is the most apt depiction of what is at work here. The Most Equal Comrade has a worldview - and it must be conceded that it's consistent; it's the one he ran on circa 2007-08, and can be found going clear back to his college writings about nuclear weapons - that so utterly ignores the danger that necessarily results from it that even his fellow Freedom-Haters understand that their tail ends will fry along with those of normal Americans.
No mere tweak, like a more forthright UN ambassador, or more frequent meetings of NATO, is going to get this back on the right track. And the kind of bold reversal that is necessary can't happen at present because this guy is in the position of ruler.
I guess speaking out about it is better than doing nothing, but Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hezbollah and Hamas are not taking any breathers. There will come a moment when a startling development will come along that is qualitatively different from the kind after which life for most people goes on and looks pretty much the same.
This is what makes the Most Equal Comrade the most poisonous figure in American history.
et tu,The Atlantic?
ReplyDeleteBut Cheney's so smart, why ain't he President?
"Dick Cheney is worried about America’s image in the world. “I think the perception around the world is increasingly negative,” the former vice president declared on Wednesday to Sean Hannity, one of the few talk-show hosts who could hear such a claim without being struck dumb by its irony. It’s become a frequent Republican refrain. President Obama’s foreign policy, opines Karl Rove in a new Wall Street Journal column, has produced “strained relations with allies and declining confidence in American leadership.” Marco Rubio recently added that, “In Asia, our allies are increasingly unsure about our ability to counter both North Korea and Chinese expansionism.”
In a way, it’s heartening that Cheney and Rove feel the need to make non-Americans the ventriloquist dummies for their anti-Obama hostility. It suggests awareness that when it comes to foreign policy, they need spokespeople more credible than themselves. And it suggests a recognition, not always obvious during the George W. Bush years, that Americans should actually care what the rest of the world thinks.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/is-the-world-really-losing-faith-in-barack-obama/371884/
"But when Cheney says world opinion is “increasingly negative” and Rove detects “declining confidence” in the United States, it’s hard not to ask the obvious question: compared to when? In fact, while faith in the United States, and in Obama personally, has declined modestly since 2009, it is still dramatically higher than when Cheney and Rove roamed the West Wing.
ReplyDeleteFor more than a decade, the Pew Research Center has been asking people around the world about their opinion of the United States. The upshot: In every region of the globe except the Middle East (where the United States was wildly unpopular under George W. Bush and remains so), America’s favorability is way up since Obama took office. "
And when you compare global perceptions of Obama to global perceptions of Cheney’s old boss, the gap is jaw-dropping.
ReplyDeleteAgain, the numbers come from Pew, which has been asking people in key countries every year whether they have “confidence” in America’s president to “do the right thing in world affairs.” Obama’s popularity is down since 2009. Still, in Mexico and Argentina, the president’s 2013 numbers (the most recent we have) are 33 percentage points higher than Bush’s in 2008. In South Korea, the margin is 47 points. In Japan, it’s 45 points. In Brazil, it’s 52 points. In Britain, it’s 56 points. In France, it’s 70 points. In Germany, it’s 74 points.
Remember that in 2002, Bush was so unpopular in Germany that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder made his opposition to the Iraq War the centerpiece of his reelection campaign. When Schroeder won, Bush declined to offer him the customary congratulatory phone call. Schroeder’s justice minister compared Bush to Hitler. And to the delight of most Europeans, Germany allied with France to thwart America’s effort to get United Nations support for an invasion of Iraq.
ReplyDeleteIn that environment, would Bush really have managed to convince Berlin to slap sanctions on Russia that cut against Germany’s short-term economic self-interest, as Obama has? I doubt it, because Germans wouldn’t have seen much of a difference between what Putin was doing and what Bush was.
When Bush was president, Cheney and Rove were defiantly uninterested in what other nations thought about American foreign policy. Now they’re convinced that those other nations yearn for the pre-Obama days. Back then, they were merely ideologically blinkered. Now they are verifiably, empirically wrong.
Schroeder had and still has his head up his ass. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10697986/Merkel-fury-after-Gerhard-Schroeder-backs-Putin-on-Ukraine.html
ReplyDeleteAnd how about the bunch running France at the time? There were some real humdingers.
It is not accurate to say W and Cheney were not interested in what other nations thought. He carefully crafted a 40-nation coalition to topple the Baathist regime in Iraq.
The reason the so many European governments and societies were soft and decadent by the turn of the century was that the US's protective umbrella had made it possible for them to not worry about their security.
These polls about popularity: do they ask specific questions such as what country would you want to lead the free world in the event of a major threat? And do they break down those polled by how well-informed they are about geopolitics?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10866863/President-Barack-Obamas-national-security-flops-just-keep-coming.html
ReplyDeleteBut while Obama was racking up symbolic victories amongst pirates and terrorists, the geopolitical situation was deteriorating, and authoritarian regimes were watching. The most egregious misstep was Obama’s drawing -- and then ignoring -- a red line on chemical weapons in Syria. At worst, it invited provocation.
At best it made him look impotent. When one considers that Secretary of State John Kerry had just compared the Bashar al-Assad’s regime to Nazi Germany and its use of chemicals to the Holocaust. In that context it was hard to interpret this struggle as anything less than a moral crusade that could not be brushed aside.
When the president did just that the media hardly noticed.
It was a similar tale when the American consulate in Benghazi was stormed, leaving four, including the ambassador Chris Stevens dead. However the media largely bought the line it was a spontaneous attack brought on by a controversial YouTube video - certainly not a pre-planned terror attack (after all, Al-Qaeda was on the run).
During that same election season, Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s declaration that Russia was a geopolitical foe, suggesting that Romney was somehow stuck in the 1980s.
But when Russia invaded Ukraine this spring -- occupying, and ultimately annexing Crimea -- it seemed that Obama’s attempts to reorder the American electorate, making foreign policy and national security “Democratic issues” again, had finally hit an iceberg.
In May, it was revealed that as many as 40 military veterans may have died waiting for care from the Department of Veterans Affairs -- and that the Phoenix VA had created fake wait lists to hide the delays. An audit report revealed that as many as 1,700 were never even scheduled a doctor’s appointment or put on a wait list. The firing of Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki was inevitable.
Over the Memorial Day holiday, Obama scheduled a surprise visit to Afghanistan (where he will eventually fulfill his 2008 campaign promise of ending the war.) It should have been a positive story, but a pall was cast when it was revealed that the White House had accidentally outed the CIA chief living in Afghanistan.
And Peter Beinart has some truly perverted views about issues such as Israeli-Palestinian relations
ReplyDeleteIt's time to put your smokescreen about Cheney not being president in mothballs. He did not want to seek the job.
ReplyDeleteHe could not have been elected dog catcher at the end of the Bush administration. For the last 2 years even Bush was not listening to him. It must make him feel powerful to criticize the current administration's every move.
ReplyDeleteAgain, the numbers come from Pew, which has been asking people in key countries every year whether they have “confidence” in America’s president to “do the right thing in world affairs.”
ReplyDeleteYou trash practicing orthodox Jew Beinert who by the way has been an extremely productive and well-reviewed & regarded author with a pristine academic pedigree, but how do his views align with Pope Francis, who also appears to be making the mistake of attempting to broker peace between Israel and Palestine?
ReplyDeleteI have been blogging here and at your previous blog since 2006. I recall you shrugging off negative world opinion many times. But now it seems to matter to you so much? A lot of what you carp about today has roots going back to the interminable Bush administration. Your ilk's carping about Obama differs little from your carping about Clinton, Bill Clinton. So far I don't see a whole lot of evidence that Cheney is all that more popular now than he was back in 2006. He has 0 power, outside his wealth. O. And it is quite likely to stay that way, but who knows what rough beast his money will help finance.
ReplyDeleteIt's not exactly "opinion" or "popularity" that I'm concerned with, but rather whether the US and the West generally is respected by its allies and feared by its enemies.
ReplyDeletehttp://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/12/30/the-anti-semitic-jew-max-blumenthal-and-how-peter-beinart-views-his-repulsive-views/
ReplyDeleteWhat, I wondered, would Peter Beinart think about the characterization of Blumenthal as an anti-Semite? Beinart, of course, is the much-heralded journalist who created “Open Zion” at The Daily Beast and who, for the past few years, has dedicated himself to a campaign that in his eyes is meant to save Israel from itself and rescue what he calls “liberal Zionism” from the catastrophe he thinks awaits the Jewish state, unless it abandons the settlements and adopts a new policy to promote peace with the Palestinians. Beinart is a frequent contributor to the The New York Review of Books, a publication not particularly known for having any fondness for Israel. Indeed, most recently, Beinart was subject to a rather savage critique by Shany Mor in the journal he once edited, The New Republic.
Mor says the following about how he thinks Beinart sees the issues:
Beinart’s discussion of suicide bombings is a good place as any to acquaint ourselves with the second theme of his writing. Any outcome or effect or result, however small or large, of the Israeli-Arab conflict is always and forever portrayed as an Israeli policy or the action of an Israeli subject on its Palestinian object. Where such a portrayal can’t credibly be made, Beinart will trace back an Israeli original cause….
No amount of self-criticism on the part of Israelis or Jews or their supporters is ever enough is for Beinart, while at the same time there is absolutely no expectation for any self-criticism or reflection by Palestinians or Arabs or their supporters.
http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2012/03/19/the-follies-and-illusions-of-peter-beinart/
ReplyDeletenothing so far exemplifies his hubris and the simplicity of his understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian issue than Monday’s article, excerpted from his forthcoming book, which obviously the New York Times hopes to make a super best-seller.
Beinart’s short essay reveals the heart of his argument, which is quickly endearing himself to the anti-Israeli American left in particular. Pretending to support a two-state solution, Beinart advances his thesis that Israel’s pro-settler policy is the reason that Palestinians have turned against the Jewish state. Of course, if the current settlements were the cause of their hatred of Israel, he would have to explain why throughout the decades they have consistently turned down every offer made by Israel that would have led to two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian. And he would have to explain why, from day one of Israel’s creation, the Arab states and the Palestinian residents, led by the Nazi ally Grand Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, pledged to oppose the Jewish state to the last drop of their blood. In their eyes, any amount of territory given to the Jews was a settlement that had to be destroyed.
To advance his agenda, Beinart now argues for a strategy of boycotts and disinvestment not in all of Israel, but just in products coming from Jewish settlers who live anywhere in the West Bank. Of course, such a boycott could never work, and no one but Beinart favors it. It would quickly become a boycott of anything made in Israel, since no one buying any Israeli products in fact knows where it is made in Israel and by whom. It also legitimizes the very idea of boycotting Israel, but this time to be carried out in the name of saving Israel from itself. This is, to use a Jewish term, a good example of chutzpah gone wild.
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2012/06/entire-panel-attacks-beinart-tomorrow12.html
ReplyDeletehttp://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/rachel-neuwirth-and-john-landau/peter-beinart-trojan-horse-in-the-temple/
ReplyDeleteWhy are we Jews laying out the red carpet to this man? And why, in general, are we Jews so friendly and deferential to our worst enemies?
One reason is that, despite the efforts of our enemies through the ages to portray us as super-sophisticated criminal masterminds, we Jews are actually very simple-minded and naive, at least where our enemies are concerned.
Beinart professes at every opportunity to love Israel and to even be a “Zionist.” He boasts that he even has an Israeli flag displayed on the wall of his six-year-old son’s room. This seems to render his Jewish audiences oblivious to Beinart’s repetition and endorsement of nearly every element of the Arab world’s anti-Israel narrative and his overwhelmingly negative characterization of Israel as an “undemocratic” society.
Not that Beinart isn’t also a clever debater. His principal tactic is to make so many false or misleading statements all at once that it is impossible to reply to or even to keep track of them all. Inevitably, some of them will sink subliminally into the minds of his audience, if they are the least bit open to suggestion. Also in his arsenal of debating tactics are distortions by omission and false assumptions implied by his tone and the drift of his argument. These methods are especially insidious since they do not require the “lie direct” and make it difficult for the audience to examine the implied assumptions on which they are based.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/05/beinarts_wrong_again_the_war_o.html
ReplyDeleteBeinart's recent rant "The War on Terror Is Over" should require no response and that it does -- after all, no one would respond to a pundit writing in favor of the Flat Earth Society -- is a sure sign of how many Americans live with short term memories and dangerous illusions.
"Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them. Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated," stated President Bush in his address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001.
Beinart's claim is that "...the war on terror was a way of seeing the world, explicitly modeled on World War II and the Cold War" and that "Bin Laden's death is an opportunity to lay the war on terror to rest as well."
Beinart's idea that the architects of the War on Terror saw this confrontation like previous wars is mistaken. He has forgotten that President Bush explained to Congress and the American people on that Thursday evening in September that "Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen."
Bin Laden's death in no way ends this war.
For God's sake, in January of this year, Beinart said that the best thing the US could do for the people of Syria is "end its cold war with Iran." Since then, not only has Assad consolidated his control, the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard in Iran have stepped up their West-hating, directly threatening rhetoric against the US - and remained adamant that they will keep enriching uranium.
ReplyDeleteOK, your ilk doesn't like Beinart. J Street honored him. J Street's principles are:
ReplyDeleteOur Principles
"We believe in the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland in Israel, in the Jewish and democratic values on which Israel was founded, and in the necessity of a two-state solution."
How does this differ from the current Pope's, would love to hear your views on that. As an aside, would love to see hyperlinkage here. Read more at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cBbmC4-jlQ
Yeah, it would be hard to find a more foul "Jewish" organization than J Street.
ReplyDeleteThe current pope presents challenges to everyone. One moment he sounds like Jimmy Carter, the next he sounds like Ralph Reed.
A lot of people listen to him.
ReplyDelete