Winning the Nobel Peace Prize has become a joke, a laughable farce, but, then, so is the foreign policy of the man who won it this year, a U.S. president who seems to subscribe to the far-left thesis of the Nobel judges that the way to achieve harmony on the planet is to harass the good guys and sweet talk the bad ones.
The good guys Barack Obama has treated badly to one degree or another include past leaders of his own country, the Dalai Lama, the constitution-abiding, principled leaders of Honduras, Israeli officials and East European allies.
Then there are the bad guys, some of whom he has challenged in a tough way even as he has also held his tongue when he should have wagged it, sometimes taking steps that seem more an invitation to disaster than a likely hindrance.
Are we really putting enough pressure on Iran, for instance, and if we don’t, aren’t we paving the way for a possible Mideast war, nuclear proliferation once Iran gets its weapons and even a nuclear exchange someday? Why in the world did he take so long to offer support for Iranian protesters, and why has the support to this day been so limp?
Why did we agree to hold back on developing a missile shield meant to protect Eastern Europe from Iranian missiles? To please Russia, even if Russia is not returning the favor by itself doing more to stop Iran’s march toward doomsday capacity?
A hint of what might be going on is a talk in which Obama as much as told Russian students that the Cold War was a kind of accident of history in which all sides shared blame instead of something promulgated by an always threatening, ceaselessly cruel, undeniably power-hungry Soviet Empire. Ronald Reagan pointedly called the empire evil, helping in a strategy to lessen the threat of mass calamity.
When it comes to criticism, Obama is often more inclined to go after fellow Americans than the likes of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. He has endlessly criticized his predecessor, sometimes indirectly and sometimes directly.
He has found fault with America in speeches abroad, as if our faults are exceptional among nations and as if our use of power has done more harm than good in the world. Perhaps he thinks a mea culpa endears us to others and advances noble causes. Na?ve.
Meanwhile, to appease China, he despicably refused to meet with the Dalai Lama in support of Tibetan rights. And then there is this ongoing puzzle: His administration has leveled sanctions on Honduras for acting democratically and constitutionally to depose a would-be socialist dictator who was clearly breaking the law.
Obama seems to believe the United Nations is a chief hope for the future. I guess he has failed to notice that at least half that body’s members are brutal dictatorships forever aiming to destroy democracies such as Israel.
The main thing he has done by way of trying to make the world more peaceful is give speeches such as the one proposing the world get rid of all nuclear weapons, a seemingly noble idea that could nevertheless give us more danger than safety if a worldwide disarmament effort were based on faulty calculations.
What I am saying is hardly new. There have been articles in a variety of places making these and similar points and sometimes underlining Obama’s perverse foreign policy predilection for considering us and our friends more a menace than those opposed to our interests. Nobel judges clearly think that grand. Many of us don’t.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
