Iran: Can Obama play hardball?
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?
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
Thomas E. Brewton, who maintains this blog, had the great good fortune in the middle 1950s at Louisiana State University to study under two of the 20th century's great minds: Eric Voegelin in political science, and Walter Berns in Constitutional law. These two professors opened the door of education to a glimpse of Western civilization and of American political and social thought as they had been before socialism was unconstitutionally established as the official national religion of the United States in 1933. | More from Thomas Brewton
Stumble It!
October 30th, 2009 at 8:26 am
“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.”
The smart ones do.
“There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.” -Sun Tzu-
“For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill. ” – Sun Tzu-
“Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. ” -Sun Tzu-
“The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom. ” -Sun Tzu-
“To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. ” -Sun Tzu-
“Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate. ” – Sun Tzu-
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. ”
We don’t need anymore Neo-con thinking getting us into a third war right now. When will the war-mongering end?
“Are we reverting to liberal-progressives’ 1960s “better Red than dead” rationalization for doing nothing for fear of offending the Soviet Union?”
DOING NOTHING IS WHAT WON THE COLD WAR! WE OUT SPENT THEM AND DROVE THEM INTO BANKRUPTCY!
Jesus christ, make the neo-cons stop their war propaganda! Our government is fully aware of the risks out there. This ain’t checkers, this ain’t chess, this ain’t poker. Combine all three and throw in real peoples lives; fear, torture, nuclear holocaust, and all the horrors you can’t imagine, and then make your proclamations of being the biggist kid on the block, might makes right, neo-con attitude!
October 31st, 2009 at 11:17 pm
“make the neo-cons stop their war propaganda!”
That’s leftist “tolerance” for you. Hold a gun to someones head until they stop disagreeing with gods anointed. Seems you’ve got something in common with the “neo cons” Jabbrewoki.