By Thomas E. Brewton
Robert Kagan’s Washington Post column gives us a look at the way the president appears to be playing his hand in the diplomatic game.
President Obama notoriously promised to bring change to our foreign policy relations. His presumption, shared by most liberal-progressives, was that every nation in the world truly desires to eschew war as a policy instrument.
Liberal-progressives take their cue from Auguste Comte’s writings in the 1820s. Comte was supremely confident that international socialism, under the rubric of his Religion of Humanity, would bring people from all over the world to learn from French intellectuals the means for restructuring political society. Restructured societies, with socialistic redistribution of wealth, would no longer experience crime, aggression, or war. Acting as moral judges, intellectuals would dictate appropriate rules for personal and international relations.
The way to realize those presumed universal peace desires, in the liberal-progressive scenario, is to be sensitive, even obsequious, and never to take military or diplomatic action unilaterally. To show its faith in the promise of world peace and benevolence under international socialism, the United States is to set an example for the world by disarming itself and reducing its economic and military power to rough equality with such powers in the rest of the world.
This diplomatic paradigm, faithfully followed by President Obama in his dealings with our self-declared enemies, has so far produced nothing more than promises.
On the domestic front, the president also is pursuing the ideology of international socialism by ballooning Federal debt to devalue the dollar, bringing large portions of industry and the financial community under direct Federal supervision, and by imposing cap-and-trade green regulation and National Socialistic healthcare, both of which will greatly increase business costs and diminish international competitiveness of American industry.
The question now confronting the president is whether he will persist in negotiating with our enemies without useful results, or whether he will implement his vaguely implied sanctions to compel good-faith negotiations by our foreign adversaries. Time to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions is running short.
Are we reverting to liberal-progressives’ 1960s “better Red than dead” rationalization for doing nothing for fear of offending the Soviet Union?
