While the world and the American mainstream media were swooning over the Obamas in Europe, the independence and sovereignty of the U.S. suffered.
The media’s flattering pictures and fulsome words of Obama praise could not mask the price Obama paid for the harmony portrayed (“my new comrade” enthused Russian “President” Medvedev) and the “successes” counted.
First, there’s the war without end going into its eighth year in Afghanistan. At the NATO meeting, Obama failed to get European troop commitments. He desperately sought to deflect criticism that the U.S. was going it alone in escalating that war.
While there are 32,000 European troops in Afghanistan already, too many are positioned far from the fighting. American troops will increase from 38,000 to 59,000 on Obama’s orders – and will be used to intensify the war in the area of eastern Afghanistan/western Pakistan. Maj. Gen. John Campbell, the Army’s deputy director of regional operations says the war will be “a long struggle.” So far, 673 Americans have died in this war. Casualties in the first quarter of this year are twice as high as last year’s first quarter.
Experts believe it could take 50 years to “stabilize” Afghanistan. Sixty percent of the people there are illiterate; most people don’t have a radio, TV or telephone. Only 12 percent of the land is arable – and the biggest cash crop is opium poppies, which produce 90 percent of the world’s opium and account for 40 percent of the GDP of Afghanistan. There is no middle class, rampant graft, and deep-rooted ethnic and tribal rivalries. Growing a democracy in this hostile environment will make the nation building effort in Iraq look easy.
Yet Obama persists with no exit strategy and an open-ended commitment funded by hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S. taxpayer will have to borrow. We are bogged down in Afghanistan with no specific goals much less a plan for victory.
At the same NATO meeting where Europe gave lip service but no real help for Afghanistan, Obama also backed away from the U.S. promise to include Ukraine in NATO – a key concession to the Russians who ignored Obama’s plea for Russian help to keep the Iranians from using the nuclear bomb the Russians helped them develop.
The Iranians were amazed to be included in new talks promoted by the Obama administration to try negotiating with the “good” Taliban in Afghanistan. The Iranians, at the same time, sent scientists and technicians to help the North Koreans launch an ICBM potentially capable of obliterating Los Angeles.
At the G20 meeting, harmony was established through American surrender.
The Chinese and Russians had demanded a new world reserve currency to replace the dollar. They got it (or at least the first step) in the form of an expansion of the SDR, or Special Drawing Rights, available to the 185 member nations of the IMF, or International Monetary Fund. While the media focused on the $1.1 trillion in new money in the IMF to help struggling economies, the evolution of the new international currency went virtually unnoticed.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner alluded that the U.S. had no objection to the new super-international currency, which economists here predict would sharply raise all prices to American consumers.,
Adding insult, the U.S. was expected to contribute $100 billion of the $1.1 trillion – money we would have to borrow from the Chinese, whose power in the IMF is now greater than the 7 percent of world GDP the Chinese economy represents.
The only disharmony at the G20 occurred as even the socialist EU couldn’t stomach the drastic deficits inherent in the Obama/Gordon Brown proposed World New Deal. While some additional EU “stimulus” will be funded, the members told Obama that EU rules prohibited member nations from running an annual deficit in excess of 3 percent of their GDP. Even the socialist EU is shocked by the American deficit climbing this year to next to 12 percent of our GDP.
In fact, the U.S. now joins such ailing economies as Argentina and Pakistan in qualifying for aid from the IMF. The Washington Post reporting last week that the U.S. could qualify for up to $42 billion in IMF aid. Only in government would it seem right that U.S. taxpayers would go into debt for $100 billion to be eligible to apply for $42 billion.
Finally, last week the U.S. surrendered any notion that energy independence was a real goal of this administration.
Not only did our American president bow low before the Saudi “king,” in submission to the need for continued Saudi oil, but he also signed a presidential order putting even more thousands of American public acres off limits to oil drilling. With “alternative” energies still decades away from fully substituting for oil, coal and gas, the whole world now knows that America will be increasingly dependent on foreign oil and therefore increasingly dependent on the favor of nations, like Venezuela, who despise what we stand (stood) for.
The lapdog American media can crow all they want about the “new respect” for Obama’s America in the world (we’re not arrogant anymore), but there is no denying the laughter in certain foreign circles at the extent of the weakness of the “changed” America. The Saudis, for example, have let it be known that, yes, they are contributing money to the Taliban to help kill American troops in Afghanistan – but, hey, you need our oil, so what are you going to do about it?
So “make nice” makes for soothing photo ops – but weakness invites attacks; appeasement invites aggression. If that lesson has not been learned, the suffering of the 20th century was in vain.
