On her recent trip to India, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton learned yet another lesson about how much international goodwill President Obama has earned with his incessant apologies and submissive attitude in international affairs. Clinton delivered to the Indians a ridiculous soliloquy apologizing for America’s Industrial Revolution and our world-shaping technological achievements (which so often feed the hungry, cure the sick, and house the poor around the world). “We acknowledge now with President Obama, that we have made mistakes – the United States – and we, along with other developed countries, have contributed most significantly to the problems that we face with climate change,” she said. “We are hoping that a great country like India will not make the same mistakes.”
The groveling was in line with Obama’s foreign policy, both in its embarrassing nature and in its ineffectiveness. For no amount of groveling could move Indian Environmental Minister Jairam Ramesh to sacrifice his people’s well-being in order to bolster the Obama administration’s self-defeating domestic program to curb global warming. “I would like to make it clear and categorical,” Ramesh declared, “India’s position is that we are simply not in a position to take on legally binding emission reduction targets.”
India’s importance here cannot be overstated. If the United States follows Obama’s plan to cap carbon dioxide emissions, the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs it will lose as a result will migrate to India and other developing nations. That will insure growing economies for places like India and China, even as they emit the carbon that Americans choose to forego. Thus, without India and other developing nations joining us in the economic self-immolation of Obama’s cap-and-trade program, there will be no net reduction in carbon emissions.
Just in the last month, Obama has kept mostly quiet as Iranians sought freedom from the despotic mullahs who oppress them, and he has offered to trade our missile defense capabilities in return for meaningless arms reductions by the thugs running the Kremlin. And the Indian incident — in which Obama’s Secretary of State sought India’s cooperation on an economic policy certain to inflict great harm on America’s economy — appears to epitomize Obama’s apparent lack of regard for legitimate U.S. security and economic interests around the world. As Obama begs for goodwill, leaders like Ramesh stand firm for their nations’ best interests. Shouldn’t Americans have a president who does the same?
