In the first presidential debate of the 2012 election, Republican
challenger Mitt Romney defeated Barack Obama handily in a takedown of the President’s
devastating domestic policies. Foreign policy wasn’t addressed, but all Romney
need do to brush up for a victory in that arena is study Bruce Herschensohn’s
new book.
Herschensohn has a long and distinguished career in
political analysis: senior fellow at
Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, former Distinguished
Fellow at the Claremont Institute, Fellow at the Nixon Center for Peace and
Freedom, and former Fellow at Harvard’s
John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics. He has authored such books as An American Amnesia: How the US Congress Forced the Surrenders of
South Vietnam and Cambodia, Above
Empyrean: A Novel of the Final Days of the War on Islamic Terrorism,
and now Obama’s Globe: A President's Abandonment of US Allies Around the World, a
concise and hard-hitting indictment of Obama’s disastrous foreign policy.
Obama was elected in large part on the promise that he would
make the world “like us” again after the supposed “cowboy diplomacy” of the
Bush era. Our allies would feel valued again, and our enemies would be
pacified. This promise turned out to be as empty as his assurances that he
would close America’s racial divide and heal the oceans.
Obama has made our allies long for the days of Carter. The
newly-elected Obama immediately began alienating our closest friends, in ways
both small and large: returning a bust of Churchill, for example, which had
been a gift from Britain symbolizing “our strong transnational relationship”;
presenting Prime Minister Gordon Brown with an insulting gift of a boxed set of
DVDs that were unplayable in the UK; and, on a grander scale, retracting our support
for England’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.
Obama’s disgraceful treatment of another close ally, Israel and
its Prime Minister Netanyahu, has earned him FrontPage Magazine’s condemnation
as “the Anti-Israel President,” and Herschensohn explains why. Regarding Obama’s
unprecedented declaration that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be
based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” for example – Herschensohn
describes it as “one of the worst, if not the very worst statement made by any
U.S. President regarding a friendly nation that won a war.” Herschensohn then details
the history behind that Six-Day War, and denounces Obama’s insistence on
referring to Israel as an “occupier”: “It is apparent that the use of the word ‘occupation’
has recently been used to describe what friends
of the United States do when they win wars, but not what enemies of the United States do when they win wars.”
Speaking of wars: Herschensohn points out Obama’s pathetic strategy
for “ending” our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Wars are not ended,”
Herschensohn states plainly. “Wars are won or lost. Historically and logically,
one side walking away from a war that is being fought frees the path for the
other side to win.” The Obama administration refuses even to name the enemy in this global war, much
less defeat it. During World War II, by contrast,
there was no exit strategy given by
President Roosevelt other than one word: Victory. That word meant the absolute
and unconditional surrender of the enemies of the United States. No
negotiations. No deals. No power-sharing. No acceptance of enemy-led political
parties in governmental coalitions in their home countries. No compromises…
Nation-building and winning hearts and minds were reserved for a later time after
victory was achieved.
Herschensohn criticizes Obama for not supporting Iran’s
Green Revolutionaries during an uprising that could have meant the end of the
theocratic regime there: “It took ten days for President Obama to make strong
statements in defense of them. Too late. The protesters had been abandoned.” He
points out that our ineffective attempts at “soft diplomacy” with Iran – “the
continued preferred course taken by President Obama” – are simply perceived “as
weakness and evidence that the U.S. is frightened.”
Herschensohn goes on in the book to identify foreign policy
failure after failure under Obama across the globe, from the Czech Republic and
Poland, to Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, to Iran and Syria, to Afghanistan and
Pakistan, to North Korea and China, even Honduras and Canada, and even above the globe – as Obama reverses
Kennedy’s quest for supremacy in space. He finishes with a discussion of how
Obama has downgraded our military capability, and what that means for America’s
position of world power:
We know that every time any great
power has given the perception of military reduction, some other power or
powers immediately started to fill the vacuum. Always. Not sometimes, but
always...
The U.S. does not need to use the
power of every weapon it has, but the U.S. does need to prove that it is willing to use every weapon it has for
survival – and mean it.
Obama’s Globe was
published prior to the recent Libyan embassy debacle, which takes Bruce
Herschensohn’s litany of foreign policy catastrophes on Obama’s watch to
exponential new heights – or depths, more properly. Even so, Herschensohn makes
an airtight case. At one point he quotes the inaugural words of President John
F. Kennedy: “Let every nation know whether it wishes us well or ill, that we
will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend and
oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Herschensohn’s
message is, Obama has let every nation know just the opposite.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Magazine, 10/17/12)
