He's no Ronald Reagan
President Hussein Obama has suddenly become a partisan of
Ronald Reagan.
“Where I completely admire him, was his recognition that if you were able to verify an agreement . . . with the evil empire,” then it was worth doing.
Writing in the Washington Post, Jackson Diehl destroys the notion that this
two-bit Islamophilic anti-Semite can be compared to Ronald Regan on any level.
Reagan might well have concluded that a bargain postponing Iran’s emergence as a nuclear threshold state for 15 years
was worthwhile regardless of the nature of the regime. Beyond that,
however, Reagan’s answer to the Soviet threat was virtually the opposite
of Obama’s for Iran. In that difference lies the strongest critique of
the policy this president has pursued.
Though he sometimes plays
it down, Obama deeply believes that what he calls engagement with Iran
can lead the regime to embrace “a different path” during the decade its
nuclear development will be on hold. Thanks to the deal, he told
Friedman, the mullahs “have the ability now to take some decisive steps
to move toward a more constructive relationship with the world
community.”
Reagan, in contrast, didn’t believe the Soviet
Communist leadership would change. He was a skeptic of the “detente”
policy pursued by Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, calling it “a one-way street
that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims.” His goal was to
do whatever he could to undermine and eventually destroy the regime,
whether it was shipping arms to insurgents fighting the Soviet army in
Afghanistan, speaking out in favor of imprisoned dissidents or
theatrically demanding that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall.
Reagan’s massive increase in defense spending and embrace of missile
defense helped to provoke the final collapse of the Soviet economy as it
struggled in vain to keep up.
Reagan’s insight was
that it was possible to strike deals with Moscow on nuclear arms while
simultaneously waging an uncompromising Cold War. Obama’s ideology,
which he has applied to Cuba and Burma
as well as Iran, is that the United States should seek not to defeat
its adversaries, but to coax them into more cooperative behavior.
Consequently, Obama has strongly resisted Reagan’s methods. He has
starved Syrian rebel forces of the arms and training they seek to defeat
Iran’s closest ally. He declined to speak up for Iran’s domestic
opposition even when it staged a street rebellion against the regime in
2009. He has never attempted to secure Iranian compliance with human
rights norms, as did Cold War treaties with the Soviet Union. At his
news conference last Wednesday, he coldly described the possibility of a
strengthened Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy army in Syria and Lebanon, as an acceptable tradeoff for the nuclear deal.
Indeed.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iranian nuclear threat, Jackson Diehl, Ronald Reagan, Soviet Union
Ouch! Sharansky: 'US suffering from tragic loss of moral self-confidence'
With the possible exception of Elie Wiesel, there may be no one alive today who is more qualified to speak as the moral conscience of contemporary government than Natan Sharansky. In a Washington Post op-ed, Sharansky makes a
biting comparison between American negotiations with Iran over its nuclear capability and American negotiations with the Soviet Union 40 years ago (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
Reality
is complicated, and the use of historical analogies is always somewhat
limited. But even this superficial comparison shows that what the United
States saw fit to demand back then from the most powerful and dangerous
competitor it had ever known is now considered beyond the pale in its
dealings with Iran.
Why the dramatic shift? One could suggest a
simple answer: Today there is something the United States wants badly
from Iran, leaving Washington and its allies with little bargaining
power to demand additional concessions. Yet in fact Iran has at least as
many reasons to hope for a deal. For Tehran, the lifting of sanctions
could spell the difference between bankruptcy and becoming a regional
economic superpower, and in slowing down its arms race it could avoid a
military attack.
I am afraid that the real reason for the U.S.
stance is not its assessment, however incorrect, of the two sides’
respective interests but rather a tragic loss of moral self-confidence.
While negotiating with the Soviet Union, U.S. administrations of all
stripes felt certain of the moral superiority of their political system
over the Soviet one. They felt they were speaking in the name of their
people and the free world as a whole, while the leaders of the Soviet
regime could speak for no one but themselves and the declining number of
true believers still loyal to their ideology.
But in
today’s postmodern world, when asserting the superiority of liberal
democracy over other regimes seems like the quaint relic of a
colonialist past, even the United States appears to have lost the
courage of its convictions.
We have yet to see the full
consequences of this moral diffidence, but one thing is clear: The loss
of America’s self-assured global leadership threatens not only the
United States and Israel but also the people of Iran and a growing
number of others living under Tehran’s increasingly emboldened rule.
Although the hour is growing late, there is still time to change course —
before the effects grow more catastrophic still.
Read the whole thing.
I often wonder if Americans have really bought into the moral diffidence of their current government, or whether that lack of conviction is the sole province of those currently running its government. Certainly, the fact that Obama was reelected in 2012 would seem to indicate that the American people have bought into his agenda of degrading America and making it no better than any other nation. And I worry that with all of the illegal immigrants Obama has made citizens, many of whom either have no clue what being an American is about, or wish to destroy what America was, another Obama-like leader will be elected in a year and a half.
As an American ex-pat and as a lover and admirer of all America represented until January 20, 2009, I can only hope and pray that Americans will see the light and elect a different kind of leadership in November 2016.
Labels: American exceptionalism, Barack Hussein Obama, degrading US military capabilities, Iranian nuclear threat, moral conscience, Natan Sharansky, Soviet Union, US presidential campaign 2016
