Quotes of the day...

Tunku Varadarajan

Obama’s solution, in the words of Charles Hill, a professor at Yale, is the following: “Close out the wars, disengage, and distance ourselves in order to carry out the real objective: the achievement of a European-style welfare state. Just as Reagan downsized government by starving it through budget cuts, Obama will downsize the
military-industrial complex by directing so much money into health care, environ-o-care, etc., that we, like the Europeans, will have no funds available to maintain world power. This will gain the confidence of those regimes adversarial to us as they recognize we will no longerbe a threat to them and that we will acquiesce in their maintenance of power over their people.” All will be well with the world.

So one wonders—as Putin embraces Chavez and Karzai plays host to Ahmadinejad; as Russia asserts the right to repudiate any nuclear-arms reduction treaty and China gives us the bird on the yuan; as the alliance with India languishes and the one with Britain experiences unprecedented atrophy; as Israel expresses acrid disagreement with us and Japan seeks to rip pages out of its postwar rulebook—what all the pragmatism has really, truly accomplished…

…other than give our delighted adversaries a free pass and our friends a very rude wakeup call.

In the context of Obama's routine use of divisive comments and choice of divisive legislation, I have wondered if Obama's foreign policy is not designed to keep the current brushfires of the world less immediate through the placating of adversaries and neglect of friends.

Nations more easily divide against themselves when absent the unifying effects of foreign threats.

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