Foreign Policy, Obama’s Weakest Point

Ever since he was elected, I have considered President Obama’s weakest point of policy making to be his foreign policy. Today, we are seeing that fear becoming manifest.

He has placated the Iranians and given empty promises of attaining peace in the Middle East by appeasement of that regime’s tactic of lying about their faithless peace desires. He has given a pass to Bashar Assad’s tyranny in Syria. He has abdicated the American gains in Iraq and given our Middle Eastern allies cause to distrust us and to know for sure that he will never back up any of his promises, e.g., the “red line” about chemical weapons in Syria. (I’ll bet the Iranians and the Assad regime are still laughing about that one!)

He must admit that Iran has been hostile to U.S. interests in the Middle East. And he must also admit that Iran has done its best to frustrate the war in Iraq and that that country has proclaimed a fierce ideological war against Israel’s place as a state. President Obama’s response to these undisputable facts is to point the blame to his predecessors. 

To make matters worse, during the first summer of his presidency, he remained aloof in the vacuum of his own ideas concerning the uprising in Iran of the brave advocates of government overthrow in Iran in the form of the Green Movement. He gave that very significant uprising no moral support of any kind. Supposedly, he was hoping that his abstention from the movement would induce the Iranian government to quit producing nuclear weapons. Of course, the regime did not do anything of the kind—the centrifuges kept spinning! On top of this, the world can see Iran continuing its support of the Assad regime and Hezbollah in Beirut. (All this without significant American protest.)

President Obama has artfully isolated the chemical weapons being used to kill civilian citizens of Syria from the larger issue that the government is using all other kinds of killing devices to destroy its civil enemies. He has also isolated the nuclear bomb issue in Iran from the obvious pain that sanctions are having on the Iranian people. He absolutely refuses to see the bigger picture of what is going on in the Middle East.

All the feckless dithering President Obama is doing in the Middle East is alarming our allies in the region. Israel is rightly afraid they will have to attack Iran just to prevent being vaporized by nuclear weapons—and all this without American support. Obama’s attitude toward the situation in the Middle East has produced a feeling of abandonment among our allies in the region, i.e., Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

 
President Obama, despite his winsome ways at the podium, is not fooling anyone. Middle Easterners have taken the full measure of this president. They know he will not back up any of his promises; they know that he is desperately trying to get out of the Middle East at any cost. They are alone in the world with the most powerful force on earth sitting on its hands in helpless repose, just hoping for a miracle. WE NEED A LEADER!