obama and appeasement

Let me premise this by first stating that I was not a big fan of George W. Bush's foreign policy strategies. However, even if Bush was a little misguided, at least he believed in democracy and the strength of America to spread the light of freedom, liberty, democracy and prosperity throughout the world. He believed that the United States shouldn't compromise its values in the face of hostility from leaders abroad. Obama on the other hand seems to believe that compromise is always the right strategy, regardless of what's at stake for the U.S.

Take for instance the recent meetings with Medevedev and Putin in Russia. The U.S. agreed in principle to bilateral nuclear arms and launch site reductions. Sounds great right? Not really when you look at the negotiating situation each side was presented with at the opening of the talks. First, Russia's nuclear arsenal is aging fast, and many of their weapons will have to be retired within the next ten years. They are simply outdated and unreliable. With a GDP less than that of the state of California, Russia simply does not have the means to maintain a Cold War size nuclear strike force. In other words, they were going to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and launch sites regardless of what the U.S. did. So basically Obama gave up something for nothing. Any advocate with any idea what he was doing would tell you this is the cardinal sin of negotiating.

But wait, you say. Obama did this to build goodwill with the Russians, right? He wanted to mend the rift the was created by Bush. The problem with that theory is that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GOODWILL WITH THE RUSSIANS. At least that is true with the pseudo-democratic leaders who are currently in power. They are not going to budge regardless of what the U.S, does on the issues that really matter like missile defense in Eastern Europe, NATO expansion (especially to include Georgia - as an aside I just want to predict now that within one year from this date, Russia will invade Georgia again), and preventing nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea. Putin lives by a cold war mentality, where his only goal is to weaken the U.S. at all costs. You simply can't negotiate with someone like that.

Obama's naivety has extended to his stances on Iran and North Korea as well. He still refuses to stand strong against the Ayatollah and support the dissenters who simply want the democracy that many of us take for granted. It is obvious at this point that the Iranian regime is intent on squashing any kind of dissent, and the U.S. and its allies should not recognize the government as legitimate. As a penalty for such brutality, the international community should place harsh and demanding sanction on Iran. Unfortunately, when the U.N. is running the show the best that is going to happen is that it will issue a strongly worded, non-binding resolution. As far as North Korea is concerned, Obama seems disinterested at best. He has taken no action despite the fact that North Korea has repeatedly broken international law in testing both nuclear devices and long range missiles for their potential delivery.

However, perhaps the most telling of all of Obama's foreign policy miscues is his support for ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Now I am not one to support military coups, but the situation in Central American can hardly be called a coup. Zelaya was attempting the circumvent the Honduran constitution in order to stay in power beyond the mandatory term limit and install himself as a de facto dictator. Basically he was trying to emulate his good buddy, an American-enemy Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Chavez has been successful in destroying democracy and spreading a new form of Leftist dictatorship in his own country, and is looking to spread the model throughout the Americas. This would explain why Zelaya was attempting to distribute Venezuelan supplied ballots in order to facilitate in illegal vote where he was circumventing the Honduran legislature. The country's Supreme Court condemned the actions. Now the correct path would be for Zelaya to be arrested, tried and impeached from office, desperate times call for desperate measures. In order to protect their entire democrtaic government, the leaders felt it necessary to kick Zelaya out of the country. Its not like dictator has been put in place, instead the legislature simply elected a interim President until full elections later this year. Obama is supporting Zelaya under the guise of supporting the rule of law, but in reality he is doing it to appease people like Chavez in the hopes that he can later "negotiate" with him on a host of issues. I thought we learned that appeasement was a bad foreign policy in 1939.