Obama is doing nothing effective to stop Iran becoming a nuclear armed power.

At the same time as he is allowing Iran to develop a nuclear arsenal, he is weakening America’s nuclear capability with the expressed aim of ultimately abandoning it completely.

Does he understand what can happen as a result of these policies?

If so, he is intentionally bringing about Armageddon.

James Carafano writes at the Washington Examiner:

Recent research suggests that nuclear weapons are much more destructive than previously thought because of the effect of mass fire. At the moment of detonation, the heart of an atomic fireball is four to five times hotter than the sun. It generates a firestorm of hurricane-force winds. Air temperature soars above the boiling point.

Both Washington and Tehran have much to learn from this. The people of Iran should realize the terrible price they may pay due to their president’s relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons. For Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, nukes are more than a status symbol. He views them as a useful tool. He publicly yearns to bring about the “death of Israel” and live in “a world without America.”

Nukes are the way to reach these goals. Give this delusional dreamer a nuclear weapon and a missile to deliver it, and he’ll be only too eager to threaten his enemies with nuclear holocaust.

That, of course, would only invite atomic retaliation … the type that would obliterate Iran…

The lesson for Washington is that the United States, a long-established nuclear power, must act like a responsible one. President Obama has started a mad dash down the “road to zero” — with the announced goal of eliminating our nuclear arsenal. It’s a path more likely to end in a nuclear firestorm than in peace.

Why? The danger starts with the administration’s refusal to fully modernize our nuclear weapons. Our aging inventory is increasingly less usable and reliable. The continuing erosion of a credible deterrent force will only invite aggression.

Moreover, slashing U.S. arsenals may well spur a new arms race. It may encourage emerging atomic enemies such as Iran and North Korea to “pick up the pace” to become our nuclear equals. That in turn could spark other nations wary of these rogue regimes to fast-track their own nuclear programs. Instead of easing tensions, our nuclear drawdown could ratchet up worldwide instability.

The administration has compounded its nuclear error by hobbling our missile defense program. War gaming exercises consistently show missile defenses not only deter attacks, they deter others from even building up their arsenals. Why build missiles when they’ll just be shot down?

A world on fire is an horrific vision of the future. The Iranian administration views it as glorious, while our administration steadfastly averts its gaze…

Lending weight to the depressing forecasts examined in our post Is America in decline? (March 1, 2010), here is news of China’s ambition and intention to become militarily mightier than America:

As America unilaterally disarms, a Chinese officer in a new book touts a new reality — that China is prepared to rule the roost, and the U.S. better keep off the grass.

On April 5, 2009, in Prague, President Obama gave a speech in which he pledged America would work toward a “world without nuclear weapons.” Almost a year later, it seems we are moving toward a world without American nuclear weapons.

“To put an end to Cold War thinking,” the president said, “we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and urge others to do the same.” The others, such as China, seem to have other plans.

“China’s big goal in the 21st century is to become world number one, the top power,” People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Senior Col. Liu Migfu writes in a newly published book, “The China Dream.” This dream could rapidly become America’s nightmare.

These are heady days for China, flush with American cash and holding large chunks of our debt.

China today has nearly $2.4 trillion in foreign exchange holdings, with roughly $1.6 trillion of that in dollar-based assets. It’s the No. 1 holder of U.S. debt in the world.

The Chinese military, infuriated by America’s sale of $6.4 billion in arms to Taiwan, recently wanted to dump some of China’s vast holdings of U.S. Treasury and corporate bonds on the market, hoping to punish us economically. China has too much at stake to do it, perhaps, but the threat is real. And in an actual crisis over Taiwan, who knows?

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as bluster, but we’d do so at our peril. China’s economic advancement and military buildup are real, as is the threat in both areas. The leadership in Beijing does not let its military speak so publicly and bluntly unless it wants to send a message that is clear and unmistakable.

Col. Liu argues that China should use its growing revenues to become the world’s biggest military power, to the point where the U.S. “would not dare and would not be able to intervene in military conflict in the Taiwan Strait.”

That possibility is increasingly real. As Defense Secretary Roberts Gates said in a recent speech to the Air Force Association: “Investments in cyber and anti-satellite warfare (by China), anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, and ballistic missiles could threaten America’s primary way to project power and help allies in the Pacific — in particular our forward air bases and carrier strike groups.”

Of specific concern is a new Chinese missile, the land-based DF-21. It’s the world’s first ballistic missile capable of hitting a moving target at sea and is designed to attack and sink U.S. carrier battle groups. The conventionally armed missile has maneuverable warheads and a range in excess of 1,000 miles.

Against this backdrop we see the U.S. almost unilaterally disarming. The administration ended financing for a new nuclear warhead to replace our aging inventory …

The new strategy will also seek to abandon Bush administration plans to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons known as bunker busters to penetrate hardened underground targets like the nuclear facilities in North Korea and Iran.

We have abandoned long-range, ground-based missile defense in Europe and cut planned deployment in Alaska and California. We have stopped production of the fifth-generation F-22 Raptor and have no plans for a follow-on strategic bomber or to replace our aging strategic missiles in their silos.

“I’m very pessimistic about the future,” writes another PLA officer, Col. Dai Xu, in another recently published book. “I believe that China cannot escape the calamity of war, and this calamity may come in the not-too-distant future, at most in 10 to 20 years.”

Is the world entering a post-American era? Will the 21st century be dominated by some other power, or several others?

In the splendid speech that John Bolton delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2010, he said of Obama, “He is the first post-American president.”

In Obama’s eyes, American superpower status is already over. The decline is happening. There’s no reason to regret it, and it would be pointless and unnecessary to try to halt or reverse it. Obama is content to let America be a nation among the nations, no different in any important respect, and certainly no better. “He sees American decline as a kind of natural phenomenon,” Bolton said.

In Bolton’s own view, however, America is still exceptional and still the one and only superpower. If its status as such is under threat, that threat proceeds from Obama himself, who, almost casually – not caring very much, as John Bolton remarked, about foreign and national security policy – is himself weakening it.

What Obama does care about is domestic policy. To achieve his redistributionist goals he has put America into crushing debt; and being determined, it seems, to turn America into a European-style socialist state, he can only make the debt vaster and heavier. That alone weakens America.

China is America’s chief creditor, but that does not mean China is now a second superpower. A China growing in wealth and confidence, and becoming an increasingly significant world actor, may pose an economic threat to America but is not, or not yet, a rival world power. Militarily it is far from a match. Militarily, America is still far and away the most powerful nation.

But there again, if Obama has his way, it won’t be for much longer. He has, in Bolton’s words, an “incredibly naïve idea” that if the US would get rid of its own nuclear weapons, other countries would give up theirs; those that do not have them but want them – such as Iran and North Korea – would abandon their intense efforts to obtain them; and the world would live at peace forever after. This belief or ambition represents, as John Bolton put it, “a pretty deep-seated strain in the left wing of the Democratic Party.” Obama will soon negotiate an arms control agreement with Russia by which he will undertake substantially to reduce America’s nuclear capability. America will not develop new nuclear weapons, or arms in outer space, or even keep its existing arsenal battle-ready by testing for safety and reliability. It is as if America had no enemies; as if America were not under attack; as if 9/11 had never happened; and as if Iran and North Korea would not drop nuclear bombs on America and its allies if they could do it and get away with it.

Furthermore, with the rest of the dreaming Left both at home and internationally, he aspires to another vision of a new earth: one that is not only sweetly irenic but held forcibly in union by a supreme governing authority. Those proposals for world taxes that we hear of; the intricate business of trading in carbon indulgences in the name of saving the earth from being consumed by fire or ice; international treaty regulations that would result in banning the private ownership of guns – all these are measures to realize the tremendous objective of “world governance”. It would mean the end of American independence, the end of national sovereignty. It would mean that the Revolution was lost, as Bolton said.

In a sense it would be the end of America, because America is an idea of liberty. And it is an idea that the world needs. Its loss would be a colossal disaster, a tragedy for the whole human race.

Can America be saved?

In his book titled The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria asserts that “America is closing down”, but allows that it “won’t be demoted from its superpower position in the foreseeable future” because “it’s not that the United States has been doing badly over the last two decades. It’s that, all of a sudden, everyone else is playing the game.”

America can “remain a vital, vibrant economy, at the forefront of the next revolutions in science, technology and industry, as long as it can embrace and adjust to the challenges confronting it”.

“The challenges” come from other nations, now rising, which he groups together as “the rest”.

China is the first of them because it is becoming an economic giant. The 21st century, he considers, may be the Chinese century.

What if [China ] quietly positions itself as the alternative to a hectoring and arrogant America? How will America cope with such a scenario – a kind of Cold War, but this time with a vibrant market economy, a nation that is not showing a hopeless model of state socialism, or squandering its power in pointless military interventions? This is a new challenge for the United States, one it has not tackled before, and for which it is largely unprepared.

Next in line is India. Poorer but democratic, India is “the ally”. Then come Brazil and Chile (plausibly); South Africa (less plausibly); and (implausibly) Russia. (Russia is a demographic basket case.)

Ironically, Zakaria says, these nations are rising because they learnt from America:

For sixty years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. … We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism.

America, then, has not been a malign power, or not always. In Roosevelt’s day other countries believed that “America’s mammoth power was not to be feared”. It was after it had won the Cold War, when it became the only superpower, that it began to go to the bad. “Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has walked the world like a colossus, unrivaled and unchecked”, and this “has made Washington arrogant, careless, and lazy.” Furthermore, he tell us, “people round the world worry about living in a world in which one country has so much power.”

To relieve that worry, America “must reduce its weaponry and work towards a non-nuclear world.” It is hypocritical for the US to insist that other countries should not have nuclear weapons while it is hoarding a nuclear arsenal of its own. By giving them up it would “gain credibility”, an end he apparently considers so desirable that it would be worth risking the nation’s very survival to achieve it.

The summer of 2002, Zakaria says, was “the high water-mark of unipolarity”. The world felt sympathy for America after 9/11. America went to war in Afghanistan, which was not good but not too bad. But then it invaded Iraq, which was very bad, and the world’s sympathy dried up. America was being too “unilateral”, too “imperial and imperious”.

George W Bush and “the nefarious neoconservative conspiracy” antagonized the world. He and his conspirators “disdained treaties, multilateral organizations, international public opinion, and anything that suggested a conciliatory approach to world politics.”

So the world’s dislike, contempt, and fear of America were justified, or at least understandable, in the light of the foreign policies of the “arrogant” Bush administration. Zakaria even claims that the animosity filled the Republicans – already full of “chest-thumping machismo” – with pride.

He asks:

Can Washington adjust and adapt to a world in which others have moved up? Can it respond to shift in economic and political power? … Can Washington truly embrace a world with a diversity of voices and viewpoints? Can it thrive in a world it cannot dominate?

The advice he gives to “Washington” for success in adjusting, adapting, responding, embracing, and thriving is to be conciliatory, apologetic. It must listen more; proclaim universal values”, but “phrase its positions carefully”; be like the chair of a board gently guiding a group of independent directors. America must “learn from the rest”. The president must meet more non-government people, have smaller entourages, rely more on diplomacy. Consultation, cooperation, compromise are the key words. He objects to such accomodations being called appeasement. Consult and cooperate, he urges, with Russia, and with “multilateral institutions” such as the UN, NATO, AFRICOM, OAS, and the International Criminal Court. (Even internally, the US legal system “should take note of transnational standards”.)

The federal government has been “too narrow-minded” about terrorism. When bin Laden got America to “come racing out to fight” him (in response to 9/11) this was “over-reaction.”  Zakaria’s advice: “take it on the chin” and “bounce back”. The government must stop thinking of terrorism as a national security issue, and think of it as criminal activity carried out by “small groups of misfits”. Although Democrats were on the whole “more sensible” about terrorism, both parties, he says, spoke “in language entirely designed for a domestic audience with no concern for the poisonous effect it has everywhere else.” His solution is better airport control round the world. The more urgent problem in his view is that American Muslims have become victims of over-reaction to terrorist attacks. Instead of being “questioned, harassed, and detained” they should, he urges, “be enlisted in the effort to understand the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism.”

Zakaria does not consider himself anti-American. He does not even see himself as a man of the left. He reiterates that he is a free marketeer. It is because America became “suspicious of free markets”, he says, that partly explains its “closing down”.

He wrote his book before the economic crisis. He saw a globalized economy bringing about an increasingly prosperous world in which the poorest nations were rising strongly enough for him to declare that “the world is swimming in capital”, and “there really isn’t a Third World any more “. But even then the dollar was sliding, and America was showing signs of being “enfeebled”.

At a military-political level America still dominates the world, but the larger structure of unipolarity – economic, financial, cultural – is weakening… every year it becomes weaker and other nations and actors grow in strength.

For all its military might, its chest-thumping phase is over and now it is “cowering in fear”. It must, he says, “recover its confidence.” ‘It must stop being “a nation consumed by anxiety”, with a tendency to “hunker down”, unreasonably “worried about unreal threats” such as terrorism, and rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. (Iran, he explains, has good reason to fear the United States, with its armies on two of its borders. It’s only to be expected that Iran would try to arm itself with nuclear bombs and missile delivery systems. He does not explain why America should not fear this as a real threat.)

He is certain about what America needs to do to propitiate and serve the world it has alienated. It should ‘‘build broad rules by which the world will be bound’’, rather than pursue “narrow interests”.

What the world really wants from America is … that it affirm its own ideals. That role, as the country that will define universal ideals, remains one that only America can play.

We know Obama has read Zakaria’s book, or at least looked into it, because there is a photograph of him holding it, one finger marking his place. Obama is doing much that Zakaria advises in foreign affairs. But that’s less likely to be because the writer has impressed the president with his arguments than because they have both drunk from the same ideological well.

Obama’s foreign policy lets us see if Zakaria’s theory works. So far it has not.

So is America’s decline beyond all remedy?

It’s a relief to turn from Zakaria’s dull and weakly reasoned book with its uncongenial credo to an article titled The Seductions of Decline (February 2, 2010) by brilliantly witty and insightful Mark Steyn. If America believes it is in decline, he says, it will be. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The view that America has been too arrogant a power; that it is not and should not be exceptional; that humility and apology are required of it; that only endlessly patient negotiation in a spirit of compromise will improve foreign relations and dissuade states like North Korea and Iran from acquiring nuclear arms; that Islamic terrorism should be treated as crime and not as the jihad its perpetrators declare it to be; that Russia should be consulted on, say, the deployment of American missile defense; and that the US should reduce its nuclear arsenal and work towards a non-nuclear world – will bring about the decline.

National decline is psychological – and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline.

His answer to the question “is America set for decline?” is yes, because of the policies of Obama and the Democrats, which arise from their acceptance of decline.

Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: Unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the American economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet.

American decline, he says, “will be steeper, faster and more devastating than Britain’s – and something far closer to Rome’s.” It will not be like France’s, or Austria’s.

Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies”, from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the free world” has been a free ride.

And after “Washington’s retreat from la gloire” as hegemon of the world, when America “becomes Europe in its domestic disposition and geopolitical decline, then who will be America?”

Of the many competing schools of declinism, perhaps the most gleeful are those who salivate over the rise of China. For years, Sinophiles have been penning orgasmic fantasies of mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the garbage heap of history. It will never happen: As I’ve been saying for years, China has profound structural problems. It will get old before it gets rich.

Not China then. Russia?

The demographic deformation of Tsar Putin’s new empire is even more severe than Beijing’s. Russia is a global power only to the extent of the mischief it can make on its acceleration into a death spiral.

Not Russia. How about the Caliphate that the terrorist war is being fought to establish?

Even if every dimestore jihadist’s dreams came true, almost by definition an Islamic imperium will be in decline from Day One.

So what might the post-American world look like? Mark Steyn’s answer is deeply depressing:

The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order – in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their own borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still remain the most inviting target – first, because it’s big, and secondly, because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

But nothing is inevitable, and Mark Steyn offers a last hope. Though “decline is the way to bet”, the only thing that will ensure it is “if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.”

When in 2008 a majority of the American electorate voted for Barack Obama to be president of the United States, it seemed that the deal had been made. But now Obama is failing, the Democratic majority is under threat, and the Tea Party movement is reclaiming the Revolution.

This could be another American century after all.

Jillian Becker   March 1, 2010

Trying to justify Obama’s foreign policy towards North Korea and Iran, the Secretary of State salvages small successes out of a morass of failure. The unimpressive exhibits she holds up for admiration only serve to prove how poor a catch she has netted, how very little she has achieved.

From Commentary’s ‘Contentions’, by Jennifer Rubin:

In a rather devastating interview with Candy Crowley on CNN, Hillary Clinton reveals the misguided premise at the heart of [Obama’s] Iran engagement policy and the disastrous results that have flowed from it. This sequence sums up the failure of engagement:

CROWLEY: I want to bring your attention to something that President Obama said in his inaugural a little more than a year ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CROWLEY: Has Iran unclenched its fist?

CLINTON: No. But…

CROWLEY: How about North Korea?

CLINTON: No. Not to the extent we would like to see them. But I think that’s — that is not all — all to the story. Engagement has brought us a lot in the last year. Let’s take North Korea first, and then we’ll go to Iran. In North Korea when we said that we were willing to work with North Korea if they were serious about returning to the six party talks, and about denuclearizing in an irreversible way, they basically did not respond in the first instance. But because we were willing to engage, we ended up getting a very strong sanctions regime against North Korea that China signed on to and Russia signed on to. And right now is being enforced around the world.

The effectiveness, however, of the sanctions remains to be seen.

CROWLEY: Did the extended hand of the U.S. help in any way that you point to?

CLINTON: It did, because — because we extended it a neighbor like China knew we were going the extra mile. And all of a sudden said, “You know, you’re not just standing there hurling insults at them. You’ve said, ‘All right. Fine. We’re — we’re willing to work with them.’ They haven’t responded. So we’re going to sign on to these very tough measures.” Similarly in Iran — I don’t know what the outcome would have been if the Iranian government hadn’t made the decision it made following the elections to become so repressive.

So China awarded full marks to the US for effort. Or was it for humility? Anyway, Hillary Clinton gives the impression that the US is on trial for good conduct, and China is the judge. The merits of sanctions against North Korea, the desirability of the ends they are intended to achieve, are not by her account what concerns, or ought to concern, China and Russia. What matters to them is, did America go about it in a manner they approved of? It did, and its Secretary of State is proud to have earned their approval.

CLINTON: But the fact is because we engaged, the rest of the world has really begun to see Iran the way we see it. When we started last year talking about the threats that Iran’s nuclear programs posed, Russia and other countries said, “Well we don’t see it that way.” But through very slow and steady diplomacy plus the fact that we had a two track process. Yes we reached out on engagement to Iran, but we always had the second track which is that we would have to try to get the world community to take stronger measures if they didn’t respond on the engagement front.

So let’s unpack that. For starters, even Clinton admits that the policy has failed. No unclenched hands in North Korea and Iran. And her justification — that our Iran policy was justified because “the world has really begun to see Iran the way we see it” — is simply preposterous. She would have us believe the world would not have seen the nature of the regime by its own actions (constructing the Qom enrichment site in violation of international agreements, stealing an election, and brutalizing its own people), but only now has begun to understand the nature of the regime because we have engaged in a futile Kabuki dance with the mullahs? It boggles the mind. And where is the evidence that Russia and China see it our way? When last we heard from them, the Russians were supplying missiles to Tehran, and the Chinese were rejecting sanctions.

There is no flicker of recognition that the president might have used his vaunted charisma and eloquence to get the world to “see Iran the way we see it” — that is, as an illegitimate and tyrannical regime. Indeed, she doesn’t even mention the democracy protestors other than to observe that she doesn’t know ”what the outcome would have been if the Iranian government hadn’t made the decision it made following the elections to become so repressive.” Not even a rhetorical bouquet to throw their way. Perhaps we are not even “bearing witness” these days. She seems oblivious to the notion that world opinion might be rallied to the cause of displacing, rather than soliciting the attention of, the despotic regime. And she gives no indication that the engagement policy has bestowed legitimacy upon the regime at the very time its citizens are seeking to overthrow it.

She also makes the bizarre claim that Iran really is not the greatest threat we face:

CLINTON: But I think that most of us believe the greater threats are the trans-national non-state networks. Primarily the extremists — the fundamentalist Islamic extremists who are connected Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula. Al Qaeda in — in Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Al Qaida in the Maghreb. I mean the — the kind of connectivity that exists. And they continue to try to increase the sophistication of their capacity. The attacks that they’re going to make. And the, you know, the biggest nightmare that any of us have is that one of these terrorist member organizations within this syndicate of terror will get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction. So that’s really the — the most threatening prospect we see.

Where to begin? She seems to suggest that we shouldn’t be so concerned about an Iranian regime with a full-blown nuclear-weapons program because there are also non-state terrorists (some of whom are supported by none other than Iran) who pose a similar threat. But wait. Isn’t this further reason to do what is necessary to prevent the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons? After all, they might be supplying those very same groups with nuclear materials.

In one short interview, Clinton has pulled back the curtain on the intellectual and moral hollowness and abject confusion at he heart of Obama’s engagement policy.

Obama has sent a letter to Kim Jong Il, the contents of which are not disclosed to the American people who pay the president to conduct their foreign relations. What on earth has he written? Does he imagine that something he says can suddenly transform the murderous little squirt who tyrannizes over North Korea into a nice reasonable guy who only wants the best for everyone?

Or does the letter ask for advice on how to attain absolute power?

From Investor’s Business Daily:

The fact is, Kim, while cunning in his pursuit of self-preservation, is a sociopath, a mass murderer of his own people, responsible for the death by famine and torture of as many as 3 million North Koreans. The idea that you can make a rational appeal to his moral conscience is, well, beyond silly. …

By some estimates Kim has killed 3.5 million people or more out of a population of 23 million. The murder toll includes children and infants. The deaths have come from starvation, beatings, torture and inhumane incarceration in hellish concentration camps.

It’s bad enough that we tolerate genocide. But someday soon, he — or his ally, Iran — will have the means to attack us. Just last week, a North Korean plane was detained in Bangkok carrying 35 tons of missiles, explosives and other weaponry. Where it was going, no one’s sure. No doubt we’ll send them a stern letter in rebuke.

As Obama descends from the clouds to touch down on Japan, Singapore, China, and South Korea, he claims to be the ‘first Pacific president of the United States’.

The following is from a piece about this by Tony Fratto, published by The Roosevelt Room under the apt title which we quote.

This is a president absolutely unburdened by what came before. “Being Obama” means to fly high and lightly above the evidence of the past.

“Being Obama”, for the purposes of this White House, is more than sufficient — it is all.

On his inaugural visit to Asia, President Obama announced a “new” orientation toward Asia, leaving an impression that prior White House maps merely employed pictures of sea monsters to depict the strange lands beyond the Hawaiian Islands.

If you were looking for a new initiative, a new program, some new evidence breaking with the past to mark the end of the old era, you would be disappointed. Understand that “Being Obama” is the difference.

“Being Obama” is the self-proclamation of “America’s first Pacific president”.

Never mind the previous presidents who hailed from the Pacific rim state of California. Never mind that a prior president served as an ambassador to China. Never mind that prior presidents served in battle in Asia, negotiated peace in the region, opened China, initiated historic diplomatic, security and economic initiatives with Asian nations and guaranteed the region’s safety.

“Being Obama” is to lightly, and without shame, disregard the irony that the nation he visits today, Singapore, was the first Asian nation to sign (during the era of disengagement!) a free trade agreement with the U.S. …

It would be unbearable to acknowledge that the key initiative cited to highlight a “new” engagement with Asia in the Obama era — the Trans-Pacific Partnership — was actually agreed to and announced by President Obama’s predecessor after years of careful work and engagement.

The President spoke of a “new” engagement with China, one that recognized that nation as important to the U.S. economy, welcoming its economic rise — not a competitor, but as an engine of growth and opportunity in the global economy. An enterprising reporter with access to Google might find these very same words, almost verbatim, used by President Bush and a succession of Bush Administration Treasury and Commerce secretaries.

Never mind that.

Never mind that the hallmark forum for engagement with China in the “new” era of engagement — the Strategic and Economic Dialogue — is a continuation of the Bush Administration’s Strategic Economic Dialogue. (A new era accomplished by the mere addition of a conjunction.)

Never mind that the hallmark multilateral forum for engagement with China on the priority strategic regional security concern — the Six-Party Talks to deal with a nuclear North Korea — is a continuation of a Bush Administration initiative.

Never mind that the hallmark multilateral forum for engagement with China on climate change — the Major Economies Forum — is, once again, a continuation of President Bush’s initiative.

Never mind all that. Shed the heavy burden of the work and sacrifice of history that preceded and fly lightly above it.

“Being Obama” is enough, and it is all.

Two articles in Investor’s Business Daily (find them here and here) describe the perils we are faced with from nuclear aggressors now that our defenses are being weakened.

First, this:

The Associated Press reports that ElBaradei’s self-styled nuclear “watchdog,” the IAEA, has concluded that Iran’s Islamofascist regime can now design and produce a nuclear bomb, according to an unpublished section of its analysis of Iran.

The IAEA also believes Tehran has “probably tested” a key component for an implosion-based nuclear warhead, and has been developing a missile chamber to carry such a warhead…

Why should all this be in a “secret” section of an IAEA report? U.S., British, French and German intelligence all report that Tehran has been at work on an atomic warhead. The only need for secrecy is to shield this defective, incompetent agency from embarrassment.

Earlier this month, diplomats gave ElBaradei a standing ovation at his going-away party…

It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that ElBaradei, who has held his “nuclear watchdog” position for well over a decade, is actually one of the most dangerous men in the world today.

He has gone out of his way to play down the genocidal threat that terror-sponsoring states in general, and Iran in particular, constitute. And he has emphatically insisted that the free world negotiate with the gang of fanatic mullahs and their henchmen who run that country. Remember: They’re the same ones who’ve vowed to wipe Israel off the map, and who also seek a world without the U.S.

Moreover, ElBaradei has almost certainly suppressed evidence discovered by his agency of Iran’s covert nuclear weapons development — in the name of peace, of course.

It’s like some twisted nightmare — an agency whose supposed purpose is to prevent the spread of the deadliest weapons instead hiding the fact that a terrorist regime is building them. And not only is its director not censured — he gets showered with awards and a grand send-off for presiding over such inexcusable acts.

The bad dream continued with the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland last week being marked by the U.S. scrapping plans for long-range missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, two of our strongest allies in Europe. Instead, we’ll have sea-based sensors and interceptors that can stop only short-range missiles from Iran or Russia.

Unfortunately, it’s no nightmare. Our leaders being asleep to the growing threat of nuclear terror is very much a reality.

Or maybe they don’t want to defend America?

Next, this:

“Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?” Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked at a “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran in 2005. “But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved.”

He added that Iran had a strategic “war preparation plan” for what it called “the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”

A simple Scud missile, with a nuclear warhead, could be fired from an inconspicuous freighter in international waters off our coast and detonated high above America.

This is where the Airborne Laser aircraft program, canceled by this administration, would come in handy.

Or it could be an upgraded Shahab launch, masked as a satellite attempt and flying over where the European defense sites would have been. It would wreak near total devastation on America’s technological, electrical and transportation infrastructure.

The threat is called electromagnetic pulse. Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., calls it the one way we could lose the war on terror. As he notes, a single nuclear warhead, detonated at the right altitude, would interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating to the surface at the speed of light.

Nobody is harmed or killed immediately by the blast. But life in the U.S., the world’s only superpower and largest economy, comes to a screeching halt as a country dependent on 21st-century technology instantaneously regresses almost a century in time.

Millions could die as hospital systems shut down and as rail and air traffic controls collapse. Farmers would be unable to harvest crops, and distributors couldn’t get goods to market. Energy production would cease. Computers and PCs would become large paperweights. Telephones, even cell phones, wouldn’t work.

Retaliation would be futile and meaningless — if it were even possible — since communications with our deployed forces overseas, including ballistic missile submarines, might be cut off. A presidential authorization might be impossible to send, so fried might be our communications infrastructure.

To defend Europe — and American troops stationed there — against the possibility of a missile attack from Iran requires a European third site. We now maintain one ground-based missile site in Fort Greely, Alaska, and a second at Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California.

President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates cite intelligence indicating that Iran’s long-range missile development is going slower than previously thought. So ignore that Iranian Omid satellite. There’s time, they say, and for now our existing Aegis and other defenses should do fine.

But shouldn’t we have our long-range defenses ready before their offense is?

The fact is, we simply have too few Aegis-equipped and SM-3 armed vessels to provide defenses for Japan and Hawaii from the North Korean threat, both long- and short-range. Where are the Aegis ships to patrol the waters between Iran and Europe — or off our own coasts, for that matter? If the administration is planning a massive shipbuilding program, we missed the announcement…

President Reagan’s dream of a layered missile defense defending against, rather than merely avenging, a nuclear attack is being suffocated in the crib.

Now the only option may be for Israel to take out the nuclear facilities of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and save us from our folly.

Or we can wait for the day when nuclear-armed missiles are in the hands of a man who wants to wipe Israel off the map as he waits for the arrival of the 12th Imam and the apocalypse.

There is serious trouble ahead among the nations as a result of Obama putting away American power as he creates a weak, poor, socialist state out of what has long been the strongest and most successful country in history.

Mark Steyn comments accurately on Obama’s ever more disastrous foreign policy (read all of what he writes here):

You’ve got to figure that by now the world’s strongmen are getting the measure of the new Washington… The Europeans “negotiate” with Iran over its nukes for years, and, in the end, Iran gets the nukes, and Europe gets to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow have their way. “This [the breaking of the promise by the US to provide  anti-missile shields to Poland and the Czech Republic] is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our arguments about the reality of the threat or, rather, the lack of one,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma’s international affairs committee. “Finally the Americans have agreed with us.”

There’ll be a lot more of that in the years ahead.

There is no discreetly arranged “Russian concession.” Moscow has concluded that a nuclear Iran is in its national interest – especially if the remorseless nuclearization process itself is seen as a testament to Western weakness. Even if the Israelis are driven to bomb the thing to smithereens circa next spring, that, too, would only emphasize, by implicit comparison, American and European pusillanimity. Any private relief felt in the chancelleries of London and Paris would inevitably license a huge amount of public tut-tutting by this or that foreign minister about the Zionist Entity’s regrettable “disproportion.” The U.S. defense secretary is already on record as opposing an Israeli strike. If it happens, every thug state around the globe will understand the subtext – that, aside from a tiny strip of land [on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean], every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.

Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? OK, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever further west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon …

Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire – not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden “technical difficulty” that halved their gas supply from Russia. The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too – in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.

In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.

From The Heritage Foundation (whose work we greatly appreciate):

According to the Polish daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, sources in the United States have confirmed that the Obama Administration has made the decision to abandon the U.S. anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, this news is not surprising at all. In March, President Obama “secretly” offered to give up the missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic in exchange for Russia’s help in discouraging Iran from building nuclear weapons.

This is a grave mistake for several reasons. First, the decision to abandon the “third site” deployment of missile interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic violates President Obama’s pledge to support missile defense that is “pragmatic and cost-effective.” Ground-based missile defense is effective, affordable and available now. Second, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), alternatives to the third site do not provide a comparable level of defense. The CBO concluded that the estimated $9-14 billion 20-year cost of the third site was half of the estimated costs of a sea-based alternative. Third, reneging on our promise to Poland and the Czech Republic sends a terrible signal to our allies in the region. Abandoning our best missile defense option in Europe only encourages Iran to speed up their ballistic missile program so that they can get their threat in place before a European missile defense system is available. This abandonment is not simply a mistake, it is a sign of weakness to countries like Iran, North Korea and even Russia.

President Obama is passing up the opportunity to protect the region against Iran, assert our authority and power to protect less powerful nations and present a strong and united front to the world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured the U.S. allies in the Middle East that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, the U.S. will offer a “defense umbrella” to protect them. What does this mean in the context of Obama’s abandonment and proposed $1.4 billion cuts in the missile defense budget?

What does it mean?  Could it possibly mean that Obama does not want to protect Europe against Iran – or Russia? Or protect ‘less powerful nations’ at all? Or ‘present a strong and united front to the world’?

For years now North Korea has been hoping for direct talks with the US. By granting ex-president Clinton the release of two illegally held American journalists that he had to come and beg for, Kim Jong Il now gets just what he wanted. The one-on-one negotiations will legitimize the North Korean regime. (They ought to delegitimize the Obama presidency.)

Hillary Clinton lies about what happened. Is anyone taken in? Is anyone surprised?

From the New York Post

One week after North Korea released two imprisoned American journalists, the Obama administration announced its willingness yesterday to hold direct talks with the rogue nation over its nuclear weapons. “The ball is in their court,” said America’s UN ambassador, Susan Rice, on CNN’s “State of the Union” yesterday.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with the rest of the administration, insisted that former President Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea to secure the release of the two journalists was not a negotiation with the country, led by dictator Kim Jong Il, but she said she hoped it would improve relations with them. “What we’re hoping is that maybe, without it being part of the mission in any way, the fact that this was done will perhaps lead the North Koreans to recognize that they can have a positive relationship with us,” Secretary Clinton said on CNN’s “GPS.”