Under Obama United States Is A Little State In World Affairs

Obama has decided that our safety as a nation is to be given up to the Gods of power lust for its sake alone. He has decided to control our economy instead of being the commander in chief of America's security. He does not care about the safety of Americans but how to control our lives. We have no leader in Washington but a small man with small ideas and with the goal of decreasing our liberties. Fouad Ajami writes:

With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. This is the genuine calling of Barack Obama, and of the "progressives" holding him to account. The false dichotomy has taken hold—either we care for our own, or we go abroad in search of monsters to destroy or of broken nations to build. The decision to withdraw missile defense for Poland and the Czech Republic was of a piece with that retreat in American power.

In the absence of an overriding commitment to the defense of American primacy in the world, the Obama administration "cheats." It will not quit the war in Afghanistan but doesn't fully embrace it as its cause. It prosecutes the war but with Republican support—the diehards in liberal ranks and the isolationists are in no mood for bonding with Afghans. (Harry Reid's last major foreign policy pronouncement was his assertion, three years ago, that the war in Iraq was lost.) ...

...History and its furies have their logic, and they have not bent to Mr. Obama's will. He had declared a unilateral end to the "war on terror," but the jihadists and their mentors are yet to call their war to a halt. From Yemen to Fort Hood and Detroit, the terror continues.

But to go by the utterances of the Obama administration and its devotees, one would have thought that our enemies were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, not the preachers and masterminds of terror. The president and his lieutenants spent more time denigrating "rendition" and the Patriot Act than they did tracking down the terror trail and the latest front it had opened at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. Our own leaders spoke poorly of our prerogatives and ways, and they were heard the world over.

Under Mr. Obama, we have pulled back from the foreign world. We're smaller for accepting that false choice between burdens at home and burdens abroad, and the world beyond our shores is more hazardous and cynical for our retrenchment and our self-flagellation. (Read "A Coldblooded Foreign Policy" No despot fears the president, and no demonstrator in Tehran expects him to ride to the rescue.at WSJ)

Standing Up Against Evil Appears Not To be In Obama's Playbook - It May Cost Him Dearly

As Obama refuses to meet with any and all liberty seekers and continues to bow to any and all tyrants we can hardly comprehend what this man is all about. It strikes us as strange and we gasp at his lack of understanding that Americans hate tyrants from Chavez to Putin to the Chinese government cracking down on dissidents. We stare unbelieving at his amazing lack of response to the brave uprising against tyranny in Iran. It leaves us bewildered, aghast and wondering - WHO IS THIS MAN LIVING IN OUR CHERISHED WHITE HOUSE? We don't know completely yet but I think a picture is forming as it does slowly when a negative is developed in the dark room. The form is slowly being etched out. And the final proof will not be a man of much substance...maybe even a man with no principles but with an exceptional power lust.

...The December headlines remind us that we have no shortage of these nasty regimes. In China, the government sentences Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in prison for writing a letter calling for legal and political reforms. In Iran, security forces fire on citizens marching in the streets. In Cuba, pro-government goons intimidate a group of wives, mothers and sisters of jailed dissidents—with President Raul Castro characterizing these bullies as "people willing to protect, at any price, the conquests of the revolution."

In all these cases, the cry goes up: Where is the president of the United States?

For a man whose whole appeal has been wrapped in powerful imagery, President Obama appears strikingly obtuse about the symbolism of his own actions: e.g., squeezing in a condemnation of Iran before a round of golf. With every statement not backed up by action, with every refusal to meet a leader such as the Dalai Lama, with every handshake for a Chavez, Mr. Obama is defining himself to foreign leaders who are sizing him up and have only one question in mind: How much can we get away with?...

One of the leading critics of President Ford's decision was Ronald Reagan. In his own time as president, Reagan met with dissidents. He quoted Solzhenitsyn often. And when he so famously upset the establishment by referring to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," Reagan no doubt recalled that night in 1975 at the AFL-CIO dinner—when Solzhenitsyn had referred to the Soviet Union as "the concentration of world evil."

Reagan set a tone that hit the Soviets in their most vulnerable spot: their lack of moral legitimacy. In retrospect, we can more easily see that Reagan's willingness to give voice to freedom-loving dissidents only increased his leverage as president as he dealt with the Soviets and their allies. (Obama Puts The Dis In Dissidents - WSJ)