A few weeks back, I wrote about the biggest challenges facing the USA in foreign policy (aside from the war on terror). The big three issues were Iranian nukes, North Korean all around craziness, and the War on Women (and Men) being waged by the Assad regime in Syria. On each of these fronts, the Obama foreign policy has been a failure. Iran continues to move towards nuclear weapons and none of the sanctions or other moves by the USA has had any effect. North Korea treated Obama with total disdain by conducting a missile test within weeks of agreeing not to do so in exchange for food aid from the USA. Now we are awaiting an upcoming nuclear weapons test by the NK's. Syria agreed to a cease fire under the aegis of the UN and the International Community. Of course, agreement to the cease fire did not lead to the Syrians actually observing the cease fire. Just today, four students were killed in dormitories in a university in Aleppo when Assad thugs decided to prevent any student demonstrations from forming at the school.
With Obama batting 0 for 3, you would think things could not get worse. But they have! We now have a fourth and a fifth major trouble spot for Obama overseas. First, the Russians are now actually threatening to pre-emptively attack anti-missile sites built in Europe as a defense against Iranian intermediate range missiles. The Russians claim that the missiles are actually aimed at stopping Russian ICBMs. This is paranoid even for the Russians (and that is really saying something). The anti missile sites will have the capability of hitting no more than a few missiles while the Russians have nearly 1000 nuclear missiles. In other words, the anti-missiles could never stop a Russian attack or lessen the deterrent value of their nuclear force. Nevertheless, today the Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov announced in Moscow that "a decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens." It is hard to imagine something worse than a threatened Russian attack on the sites in Poland, Romania and Turkey. It would be the start of World War III and could easily develop into a nuclear disaster. Indeed, one has to assume that the Russians would never actually make such an attack since they would realize that to do so would be equivalent of suicide.
So why would the Russians have their most senior military leader say such a thing. The answer is clear: the Russians think that Obama can be rolled. In other words, the Russians think that by issuing threats they can get their way as Obama backs down. Another loss for Team Obama.
The fifth problem now has arisen in China with the treatment of a blind dissident. There are conflicting stories out now, but the word from the dissident himself is that he left the US embassy when American personnel told him that if he did not leave his wife would be beated to death by the Chinese. In other words, Team Obama told the guy to go back to virtual prison or his family would get killed. They did not tell this freedom fighter that the USA would stand with him to try to extricate his family from Chinese control. Team Obama did nothing to fight for liberty or human rights. Nope, Team Obama just backed off in the face of pressure.
It seems that the Russians have probably got it right. Obama backs down when pushed. He is so weak that the USA is treated as the paper tiger that the Chinese used to describe. What a disappointment.
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