State of the Union Address on Foreign Policy: Careful Phrasing Conceals Disasters
The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe. Our oldest alliances in Europe and Asia are stronger than ever. Our ties to the Americas are deeper. Our iron-clad commitment — and I mean iron-clad — to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history.
Really? That’s not what I hear from people all over the world. It is the absence of American leadership they feel, sometimes to their great cost. Ask the Poles, and the Czechs, and the Saudis, and the democratic oppositionists in Iran and Syria, and so on. Ask the Peruvians and the Colombians if they feel American leadership is protecting them from Venezuela and other radical forces in the region.
And it is true that military cooperation with Israel is good — which is to say normal, not the greatest in history — but what Israeli leader believes that Obama can be relied on? The ones I speak to usually say something like this: “I never thought I’d see the day when we couldn’t depend on America.”
Incidentally, a number of analyses I’ve seen since writing this article emphasize Obama’s nice sentence about Israel, as if it is of great importance or is some kind of revelation. For goodness sakes, it is standard — even though he repeated the word “iron-clad” — and denotes absolutely nothing new. I don’t think Obama will do much in regards to bilateral relations, but let’s be frank here: Since Obama believes he knows better what Israel’s security needs are than do its leaders, then anything he does is “pro-Israel” even if it is against Israel’s will. I’m not trying to make any dramatic point here — again, bilateral relations will continue to be okay — but to point out the bizarre way Obama’s statements get interpreted in order to praise him. The same applies to his standard sentence on keeping all options open regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease, from the blows we’ve dealt our enemies, to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back. Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Think about the kind of mental construct that could produce this paragraph, which is unintentionally revealing. It shows Obama’s pattern of refusing to acknowledge legitimate dissent (all the experts agree with me) and claiming that he knows best (Israel doesn’t know what’s good for itself).
Yes, Mr. President, a lot of people around the world don’t think that America is back or that it still protects their back. And they do know what they are talking about and can cite many specific examples from your administration.
The next paragraph requires no comment from me. See if you can finish it and not be laughing:
That’s why, working with our military leaders, I’ve proposed a new defense strategy that ensures we maintain the finest military in the world, while saving nearly half a trillion dollars in our budget.
Not budget cuts to the military but “saving” money. So that it can be spent on green energy projects?
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Image courtesy shutterstock / bjonesphotography
A simply excellent commentary on O’s State of the Union address. Frankly, I rarely listen to any of these as they are full of silly platitudes, meaningless phrases & 99% brown sugar. However, O has reached the pinnacle of lies in his address. Certainly, NO one could have done it better than O-even Bill Clinton. And, quite frankly, everyone knows what an excellent liar he is.
Our Dear Leader just yaps away like an annoying, arrogant & proud poodle at the world while our country races down the path to the garbage heap of nations. Sadly, our 0nce great land will never recover from the Obama regime.
How can so many not see that the Emperor (meant in every sense of the word) has no clothes & is a complete phoney & failure? It is truly beyond me…
“If American cars are on those foreign streets, it will be because they were manufactured in China. (I wonder if Obama’s choice of South Korea rather than China as the Asian country in his list was deliberately made to conceal that fact.)”
Weren’t South Korea, Panama and Colombia the three free trade agreements Democrats had blocked under Bush but finally ratified under Obama? That’s where I assumed his speech was pointing to. With one of their own in the White House, Dems are free traders. (As with NAFTA and GATT under Clinton. Would a Democratic Congress have passed either of these agreements with Bush 41 in the WH?)
This guy Obam is ridiculing the political awareness of Americans and at most the global community. I’ve got a disturbing hunch, he himself is not aware of the facts, nor had he not gone across the speech before delivery, his writers pure charlatans fishing accolades for their Big Patron the president, than serving the people with facts and truths.
This person, is a real inspired one by the ‘abomination of desolation’. He is a typical or exact replica of it.
I disagree with Mr Rubin: the State of the Union speech by Pres Obama was cogent, eloquent and poignant. It is a privilege to be alive in the Obama era, year in which America at last shed its legacy of racism. From his pioneering approach to Islamophobia to advocacy for social justice, Pres Obama will effect fundamental change in the United States and throughout the world. Let us open the borders and set the minimum wage to $100,000 per year as an innovative program to eliminate poverty in this hemisphere. Watch and wait as unilateral cuts in the American nuclear arsenal inspires the world — and in particular Iran and North Korea — to eliminate their own nuclear weapons programs. The Nobel-recognized moral example of Pres Obama will surely bring peace in our time.
Let me guess moshe, you are also in favor of getting rid of marijuana laws.
after re-reading you comment, I realized it was sarcasm.
“… & 99% brown sugar.” Ah – ha! I knew you were racist! (Sorry…couldn’t help myself.)
With the situation in the middle east becoming more unstable by the day and several large African nations perpetually on the brink of a Muslim / Christian civil conflict I can’t see even Obama’s delusional world view maintaining his run of imaginary foreign policy successes
This is an interesting and still-timely commentary, but it seems to apply to the 2012 SOTU, not the one delivered by Obama this week.
Notice a very strange and ungrammatical formulation: “Most of al-Qaieda’s top lieutenants have been defeated.”
This is neither ungrammatical nor strange. And, with respect, it’s not too difficult to find “ungrammatical formulations” in any of Dr. Rubin’s posts. An annoying recurring example is the improper use of “would” in conditional protases expressing past-tense counterfactuals.