Trying to Clean Up the Mess

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Trump vs. Obama on Foreign Policy

More of the Same

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

And What Were You Expecting?

Wrong Kind of Boots

Apologize for Hiroshima?

It would certainly be in character for Barack Obama, who takes a pretty negative view of America’s role in the world (at least, of most of the things we did before he became president).

But interestingly enough, the Japanese (or at least their government) isn’t keen on the idea, as explained in an article in the Los Angeles Times.

In the first place, the current government is relatively hawkish, and doesn’t welcome the knee-jerk pacifism that bringing up the issue will tend to generate. Then there is this:

“Why doesn’t the Japanese government want Mr. Obama to apologize? Because it tears the scab off a much bigger wound that Japan wants healed,” says Grant Newsham, a senior research fellow with Japan Forum for Strategic Studies and former U.S. diplomat with over 20 years’ experience in Japan.

“If Obama apologizes at Hiroshima, it draws attention to Japanese behavior elsewhere in Asia during the ’30s and ’40s. It might even be demanded that the Japanese government and emperor go to Singapore and apologize for slaughtering 25,000 Chinese there in 1942. Or to Australia to apologize for how they treated their POWs. Or to the Philippines (to apologize) for a few hundred thousand murders by the Imperial Japanese Army as well.”

Apologizing for dropping the atomic bomb is a bit like apologizing for slavery: it’s a form of moral self-pleasuring. It doesn’t make anything any better, and all the people responsible are long since dead.

But it’s worse than that. Dropping the bomb was a horrible way to end a horrible war, but it was less horrible than the alternatives. The ruling Japanese military was willing to fight to the death, and not just to their own death. They were willing to fight to the death of literally millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians.

Virtual Foreign Policy

Not Scary

Bob Ashmore: Anti-Israel Former Marquette Professor on Foreign Policy

We know Bob Ashmore (but haven’t seen him in quite a while, since he hasn’t been on campus). He’s actually a good guy. But some of his opinions seem to us really far, far out.

Obama’s Revisionist History of the Cold War

From Liz Cheney, writing on the Wall Street Journal.

There are two different versions of the story of the end of the Cold War: the Russian version, and the truth. President Barack Obama endorsed the Russian version in Moscow last week.

Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: “The American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.”

The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime. The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind. The basis of the Cold War was not “competition in astrophysics and athletics.” It was a global battle between tyranny and freedom. The Soviet “sphere of influence” was delineated by walls and barbed wire and tanks and secret police to prevent people from escaping. America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the Cold War. The Soviets were not. The Cold War ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat Communism.

But, one might ask, why not revise history a bit in the interests of getting along? Why be so pro-American?

The problem is deep-seated, and it’s in the way Obama looks at the world.

Mr. Obama has become fond of saying, as he did in Russia again last week, that American nuclear disarmament will encourage the North Koreans and the Iranians to give up their nuclear ambitions. Does he really believe that the North Koreans and the Iranians are simply waiting for America to cut funds for missile defense and reduce our strategic nuclear stockpile before they halt their weapons programs?

The White House ought to take a lesson from President Harry Truman. In April, 1950, Truman signed National Security Council report 68 (NSC-68). One of the foundational documents of America’s Cold War strategy, NSC-68 explains the danger of disarming America in the hope of appeasing our enemies. “No people in history,” it reads, “have preserved their freedom who thought that by not being strong enough to protect themselves they might prove inoffensive to their enemies.”

Perhaps Mr. Obama thinks he is making America inoffensive to our enemies. In reality, he is emboldening them and weakening us. America can be disarmed literally -- by cutting our weapons systems and our defensive capabilities -- as Mr. Obama has agreed to do. We can also be disarmed morally by a president who spreads false narratives about our history or who accepts, even if by his silence, our enemies’ lies about us.

Of course, this is not just “Obama’s way of looking at the world.” It’s the liberals way of looking at the world. It’s the way the average student is taught in the average political science or history class in the average university today.

In spite of this, it doesn’t always prevail under Democratic administrations. It never did in pre-Vietnam Democratic Administrations, and it didn’t really prevail in the Clinton Administration. But it did prevail under Jimmy Carter -- at least until he learned a hard lesson about Communism when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Will history teach a hard lesson to Barack Obama, or will be luck out with him leaving the presidency before that happens?

Obama and Foreign Policy: Following in the Footsteps of Jimmy Carter

From Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe:

EARLY IN HIS PRESIDENCY, Jimmy Carter set about to alter US policy toward the Soviet Union. Six days after his inauguration he sent a letter to Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev, hailing the two countries’ “common efforts towards formation of a more peaceful, just, and humane world” and saluting Brezhnev’s supposed “aspiration for strengthening and preserving . . . peace.” In a commencement address at Notre Dame, he declared that Americans had shed “that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.” In the months that followed, Carter slashed the defense budget, scrapped the B-1 bomber, welcomed the takeover of Nicaragua by a Marxist junta, and launched diplomatic relations with the Castro dictatorship in Cuba.

Carter’s failure to understand the threat posed by the Soviet Empire had costly consequences for America and the world. Will this pattern now be repeated with Barack Obama and the global threat from radical Islam?

Ever since taking office two weeks ago, Obama has been at pains to proclaim a change in US-Muslim relations. In his inaugural address he invited “the Muslim world” to embark on “a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” Six days later he gave Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language satellite channel, his first televised interview as president. This week he continued his charm offensive with a friendly letter to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 57 Muslim governments. He has promised to deliver a major address in an Islamic capital by spring.

The president cannot be faulted for using his bully pulpit to reach out to the world’s Muslims, especially given his Muslim roots and family ties. But running through Obama’s words is a disconcerting theme: that US-Muslim tensions are a mostly recent phenomenon brought on largely by American provincialism, heavy-handedness, and disrespect. Missing is any sense that the United States has long been the target of jihadist fanatics who enjoy widespread support in the Muslim world.

“My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy,” Obama said, although “we sometimes make mistakes” and “have not been perfect,” and even though “too often the United States starts by dictating” and fails to use “the language of respect.”

Such apologetic pandering is inexcusable. For decades, as commentator Charles Krauthammer noted last week, “America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them.” To liberate oppressed Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Americans risked -- and in many cases lost -- their lives.

Even more troubling is Obama’s seeming cluelessness about US-Muslim history.

“The same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago -- there’s no reason why we can’t restore that,” the president said on Al-Arabiya.

Well, let’s see. Twenty years ago, in 1989, American hostages were being tortured by their Hezbollah captors in Beirut and hundreds of grief-stricken families were in mourning for their loved ones, murdered by Libyan terrorists as they flew home for Christmas on Pan Am Flight 103. Thirty years ago, in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran, proclaimed America “the Great Satan” and inspired his acolytes to seize the US embassy and hold scores of Americans hostage for nearly 15 months. That same year Islamist mobs destroyed the US embassies in Pakistan and Libya, and staged anti-American riots in other countries.

Obama, like Carter, is simply your garden variety liberal. As such, he believes that if we have any enemies it’s our fault that they don’t like us. It couldn’t possibly be that there are evil people in the world (like Communists and radical jihadists) who hate us because of our superior institutions and belief system. Rather, our institutions and belief system are (at best) no better than others, or (more typically) inferior.

Thus, all one needs is to “understand” the point of view of our enemies, and “dialogue” with them.

Ronald Reagan was willing to “dialogue” with Communists, but only from a position of strength, and with the clear understanding that Communism was an evil philosophy and that the Cold War was their fault. Which is why he was a great president, and Carter is an object of ridicule.

Jacoby concludes:

The global jihad, like the Cold War, will only end when our enemies lose their will to fight -- or when we do. Let us hope [Obama’s] a quicker study than Jimmy Carter.

There is no evidence he will be.