Victor Davis Hanson is sounding the clarion call that our current administration is making a mess of our alliances and that the appeasement vibes emanating out of the White House is merely emboldening our enemies. These are dangerous times to be a friend of the United States. Hillary Clinton and the shadow Secretary of State Samantha Power, are going to be responsible for the deaths of so many good people who loved and trusted America.
by Victor Davis Hanson
Not being George W. Bush while apologizing for America’s purported sins is not a foreign policy.
Ronald Reagan came into office with the idea of rolling back the Soviet Union. Reagan hoped that such an evil empire might collapse from its inability to match a newly confident United States.
George H. W. Bush sought to oversee a peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire, the reunification of Germany, and a new Western-led world order that thugs such as Manuel Noriega or Saddam Hussein could not disrupt.
Bill Clinton pushed Western-inspired liberal globalization to lift the Third World out of poverty.
After 9/11, George W. Bush sought to keep America safe from another round of Islamic terrorism while promoting Middle East constitutional government as a way of weakening Islamic terrorism.
But what exactly does Barack Obama wish to accomplish abroad?
In interviews and speeches, Obama emphasizes his nontraditional background and his father’s Islamic heritage. Apparently, he hopes that by reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush, America will be better liked.
But without a strategic vision, “Bush did it” leads nowhere — given that most of the world’s problems predated and transcend Bush. Obama doesn’t seem to understand than wanting people to like America is only a means to an end, not a policy in itself — and an especially dubious means, given the character of many nations in the world today.
Nor does Obama comprehend that global tensions often reflect fundamentally different views of the human condition, rather than simple miscommunication or clumsy diplomacy — and so can’t be solved by serial apologies.
[…]
In all these crises, trashing George W. Bush, reaching out to enemies and taking friends for granted is not proving to be a coherent foreign policy. Instead, it is a prescription for a disaster not seen since 1979, when another messianic American president thought he could charm the world by making our enemies like us.
And we all know how that ended.
Read the rest here: “Bush did it” is not a foreign policy
Tags: Victor Davis Hanson
