One article linked to in Mr. Kern’s piece explains: “…he (Obama) sought to use the mea culpa as leverage to alter European views of America and secure more troops for the war in Afghanistan.” If this statement is true, then his “apology” for his own country yielded no positive results, as the Europeans have committed NO new troops to the Afghan struggle. Meanwhile, the French celebrate Obama throwing capitalism under the bus, and America signing on to the economically disastrous notion that we can “fight global climate change” by adopting cap and trade or other burdensome taxes/regulations. The article does not mention that Obama went on to suggest that we get rid of all nuclear weapons, when we haven’t and don’t plan to do anything meaningful to stop nuclear development in North Korea and Iran (not counting a strongly worded UN letter of condemnation that neither Russia nor China will agree to).
American “arrogance” amounted to taking action against Saddam Hussein after he had ignored and/or violated 18 UN resolutions. Even then, we did not act unilaterally but with a coalition of allies – those few countries that believe foreign policy is not just hot air. Now that Bush is gone, Obama and his European admirers can go back to the hot air policies of the past – hot air is all he’s got to offer, no matter how much he is worshiped on either side of the Atlantic.
