Roland Lane

2 hours ago near Columbus ·

• On Barak Obama and Foreign Policy, An Essay.
  
  The nation is now learning again the value of using some measure of caution when picking its President. Barak Obama like much of the American Democratic Party has spoken Centrist in election campaigns and governed Left with the power of the office. Fear mongering has become standard fare. (Republicans will cut off Social Security-push grandma off the cliff, kill small children and presumably eat them etc.) Election campaigning changed when Bill Clinton realized that issues, no matter how you manipulated them, were important only in relation to the image that you created of the opponent. Clinton neutralized some of the veterans support for Bob Dole by hammering that Dole would kill Social Security. Simultaneously he shored up the Soccer Mom vote with the emotional but effective pitch for safety and the very effective "I feel your pain."
  
  The image originally created by the Left for the opponent George W. Bush was that of stupidity. Bush was a stupid candidate. The stupid candidate cleaned the Democrat clock with election and congressional wins and "stupid" was discarded. The new image put out by the Democratic Party was that Bush was devious. "Bush lied, people died." Devious was good but evil was better. Katrina and the economic Crash were evil things; and although the placement of devious Bush against evil things did not make a great fit, it was good enough to win elections. Bush now had been moved from "stupid" to "devious" to "evil".
  
  The problem for Barak Obama is that word manipulation and proper scene staging worked briefly for Obama in the early years of his foreign policy. Later, his Google/Facebook friends in Egypt successfully used social media to throw a revolution. With the core of the activity played out in Tahir Square in Cairo the revolution coordinated and focused its resources with 24/7 live television. With a little help from Al Jazeera, Katie Couric et al, the supporters of President Mubarak were neutralized. For a person like Barak Obama who cut his political teeth on "community organizing" the Egyptian Revolution nailed down the notion that words had no meaning other than to reinforce the power of the activity or image of the moment. The most powerful image to obtain was the viability of my good vs. your evil.
  
  These are not new things in the study of human nature and politics, but the damage done was that Barak Obama became convinced that the notion of quick words worked in all places all the time. Foreign capitals long have weighed their foreign policy actions by the actual words of the President of the United States coupled with the long view assessment of his person. What have they learned?
  1. Barak Obama is always in campaign mode. Teleprompters and a very friendly press permitted Obama to stage an event, try a variety of words, adjust to the polls and move on.
  2. "Drawing a line in the sand" in previous diplomatic verbal exchanges would have meant in the course of 14 or 15 steps to war, the United States was approximately at level 13. Now its meaning is uncertain.
  3. Both the students of the student-led mini revolution in Iran who found no support in Barak Obama in June of 2009, and the leaders of Iran who are convinced that the United States will grant them a right to own nukes, have drawn their own conclusions about the direction of Obama and US foreign policy. The conclusion is that at best, Obama is erratic and at worst, has no direction. The students in Iran were abandoned and the leadership who had launched a massive nuclear program were emboldened.
  4.The world is now in a most dangerous place. The pace setter and leader of the free world is running its foreign policy like 1968 political Left street theater-momentary, ever changing, and contextually shaped by camera rather than history.
  5. Obama's distaste for being the world's policeman is now overshadowed by his distaste of being its leader. His belief that we as Americans are inherently evil and his notion that the world outside of the US is inherently good will surely bring disaster as nations realign for power and position using all means that each commands. It is the age old problem of all great egotists who find themselves in the seat of power and who eschew the realities of history, especially that history which they do not like. For Barak Obama, that history he does not like is that fact that U.S. foreign policy for the last 70 years has balanced power and responsibility, curtailed and eliminated the advances of Fascists, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and is now enjoined in the struggle against Radical Islam.
  
  This is not street theater Mr. President. It is real and the world will not be kind to itself, to you, or to the United States as it wrestles with the uncertainties and evils that will fill the vacuum you have created.