President Barack Obama is getting generally positive reviews from the purveyors of conventional wisdom for his performance at the London G-20 summit and in France during a joint appearance with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. An admiring news story in The New York Times, for instance, all but hailed Obama for setting “a new tone for the alliance with Europe.” Unfortunately, the new tone consists mainly of Obama apologizing for those times “when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward its European allies. A revealing measure of Europe’s receptivity to Obama’s apologies came when France agreed to host exactly one Guantanamo detainee. That’s one down, 244 to go.
White House officials sought to portray the current foreign tour as a success because the G-20 conferees agreed to establish a new $1.1 trillion International Monetary Fund program to finance new projects in developing nations. They also cited the agreement to establish an international Financial Stability Board (FSB) designed to prevent future recurrences of the current global meltdown (which, incidentally, the president sorrowfully said was mainly caused by the U.S.). But that is awfully thin ground upon which to stake a claim of diplomatic success, particularly when the hard facts are examined. The new IMF endeavor, for example, can hardly be expected to boost Western economies since it will be largely funded by those same Western economies. And there are multiple reasons to be highly suspicious of the FSB, reasons which will be addressed in this space in the near future.
For now, The Examiner’s Irwin Stelzer offered a far more realistic and measured assessment from his London perch, noting in Friday’s edition that when Obama met with President Hu Jintao that Obama quickly conceded China’s two major goals – a state visit to Beijing and a larger role in the IMF. But Obama did so without a single concession in return. “The small matters of human rights, North Korea’s missile launch, and China’s recent proposal to have the dollar replaced as the world’s reserve currency did not come up,” Stelzer said. This points to the essential flaw in the Blame America First strategy in foreign affairs: It continually puts our chief executive in a submissive posture, thus undercutting his credibility as an equal partner in mutually beneficial diplomatic relationships. And as Europe knows only too well, such weakness eventually emboldens brutal regimes like Iran to bloody adventurism. This lesson was most vividly demonstrated in World War II, from which devastation Europe recovered only because of the U.S. Marshall Plan. President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan 60 years ago, to the day of the G-20 Communique. Apparently, our president was too busy apologizing for our many sins to note the anniversary of America’s extraordinary generosity.
