Slapping Friends
Charles Krauthammer - Townhall.com, April 2nd, 2010
WASHINGTON — What is it like to be a foreign ally of Barack
Obama's America?
If you're a Brit, your head is spinning. It's not just the personal
slights to Prime Minister Gordon Brown — the ridiculous 25-DVD gift, the
five refusals before Brown was granted a one-on-one with The One.
Nor is it just the symbolism of Obama returning the Churchill bust
that was in the Oval Office. Query: If it absolutely had to be out of
Obama's sight, could it not have been housed somewhere else on U.S. soil
rather than ostentatiously repatriated?
Perhaps it was the State Department official who last year denied
there even was a special relationship between the U.S. and Britain, a
relationship cultivated by every U.S. president since Franklin
Roosevelt.
And then there was Hillary Clinton's astonishing, nearly unreported
(in the U.S.) performance in Argentina last month. She called for
Britain to negotiate with Argentina over the Falklands.
For those who know no history — or who believe that it began on Jan.
20, 2009 — and therefore don't know why this was an out-of-the-blue slap
at Britain, here's the back story:
In 1982, Argentina's military junta invaded the (British) Falkland
Islands. The generals thought the British, having long lost their taste
for foreign lands, would let it pass. Besides, the Falklands have
uncountably more sheep than people. They underestimated Margaret
Thatcher (the Argentines, that is, not the sheep). She was not about to
permit the conquest of a people whose political allegiance and ethnic
ties are to Britain. She dispatched the navy. Britannia took it back.
Afterward, neither Thatcher nor her successors have countenanced
negotiations. Britain doesn't covet foreign dominion and has no shortage
of sheep. But it does believe in self-determination, and will negotiate
nothing until and unless the Falkland Islanders indicate their desire
to be ruled by a chronically unstable, endemically corrupt polity with a
rich history of dictatorship, economic mismanagement and the occasional
political lunacy.
Not surprisingly, the Falkland Islanders have given no such
indication. Yet inexplicably, Clinton sought to reopen a question that
had been settled for almost 30 years, not just pointlessly stirring the
embers but even taking the Argentine side (re: negotiations) against
Britain — a nation that has fought and bled with us for the last decade,
and that today has about 10,000 troops, far more than any other ally,
fighting alongside America in Afghanistan.
Of course, given how the administration has treated other allies,
perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised.
– Obama visits China and soon Indonesia, skipping India, our natural
and rising ally in the region — common language, common heritage, common
democracy, common jihadist enemy. Indeed, in his enthusiasm for China,
Obama suggests a Chinese interest in peace and stability in South Asia, a
gratuitous denigration of Indian power and legitimacy in favor of a
regional rival with hegemonic ambitions.
– Poland and the Czech Republic have their legs cut out from under
them when Obama unilaterally revokes a missile defense agreement,
acquiescing to pressure from Russia with its dreams of regional hegemony
over Eastern Europe.
– The Hondurans still can't figure out why the United States
supported a Hugo Chavez ally seeking illegal extension of his presidency
against the pillars of civil society — its Congress, Supreme Court,
church and army — that had deposed him consistent with Article 239 of
their own constitution.
But the Brits, our most venerable, most reliable ally, are the most
disoriented. “We British not only speak the same language. We tend to
think in the same way. We are more likely than anyone else to provide
tea, sympathy and troops,” writes Bruce Anderson in London's
Independent, summarizing with admirable concision the fundamental basis
of the U.S.-British special relationship.
Well, said David Manning, a former British ambassador to the U.S., to
a House of Commons committee reporting on that very relationship: “He
(Obama) is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience
was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes,
if you like, are not there.”
I'm not personally inclined to neuropsychiatric diagnoses, but
Manning's guess is as good as anyone's. How can you explain a policy
toward Britain that makes no strategic or moral sense? And even if you
can, how do you explain the gratuitous slaps to the Czechs, Poles,
Indians and others? Perhaps when an Obama Doctrine is finally worked
out, we shall learn whether it was pique, principle or mere
carelessness.
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