I think he has O's number.






                    By MARK STEYN





Posted Friday, September 18, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Was it only April? There was President Obama, speaking (as is his
wont) in Prague, about Iran's nuclear program and ballistic missile
capability, and saluting America's plucky allies:


"The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host
a defense against these missiles," he declared. "As long as the threat
from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system
that is cost-effective and proven."




On Thursday, the administration scrapped its missile defense plans
for Eastern Europe. The "courageous" Czechs and Poles will have to take
their chances.


Did the "threat from Iran" go away? Not so's you'd notice.




The dawn of the nuclear Ayatollahs is perhaps only months away,
and, just in case the Zionists or (please, no tittering) the formerly
Great Satan is minded to take 'em out, Tehran will shortly be taking
delivery of a bunch of S-300 anti-aircraft batteries from (ta-da!)
Russia. Fancy that.





Joe Klein, the geostrategic thinker of Time magazine, concluded his analysis thus:


"This is just speculation on my part. But I do hope that this
anti-missile move has a Russian concession attached to it, perhaps not
publicly (just as the U.S. agreement to remove its nuclear missiles
from Turkey was not make (sic) public during the Cuban Missile Crisis).




"The Obama Administration's diplomatic strategy is, I believe,
wise and comprehensive — but it needs to show more than public
concessions over time. A few diplomatic victories wouldn't hurt."




Golly. We know, thanks to Jimmy Carter, Joe Klein and many others,
that we critics of President Obama's health care policy are by
definition racist.




Has criticism of Obama's foreign policy also been deemed racist?
Because one can certainly detect the first faint seeds of doubt
germinating in dear old Joe's soon-to-be-racist breast: The Obama
administration "needs to show more than public concessions over time" —
because otherwise the entire planet may get the vague impression that
that's all there is.




Especially if your pre-emptive capitulations are as felicitously
timed as the missile-defense announcement, stiffing the Poles on the
70th anniversary of their invasion by the Red Army. As for the Czechs,
well, dust off your Neville Chamberlain's Greatest Hits LP: Like he
said, they're a faraway country of which we know little.





So who cares? Everything old is new again.




It's interesting to contrast the administration's "wise" diplomacy
abroad with its willingness to go nuclear at home. If you go to a "town
hall" meeting and express misgivings about the effectiveness of the
stimulus, you're a "racist" "angry" "Nazi" "evilmonger" "right-wing
domestic terrorist."





It's perhaps no surprise that that doesn't leave a lot left over in the rhetorical arsenal for Putin, Chavez and Ahmadinejad.




But you've got to figure that by now the world's strongmen are
getting the measure of the new Washington. Diplomacy used to be, as
Canada's Lester Pearson liked to say, the art of letting the other
fellow have your way.





Today, it's more of a discreet cover for letting the other fellow have his way with you.




The Europeans "negotiate" with Iran over its nukes for years, and
in the end Iran gets the nukes and Europe gets to feel good about
itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for
the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism
in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow
have their way.




"This is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our
arguments about the reality of the threat, or rather the lack of one,"
said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma's international affairs
committee. "Finally the Americans have agreed with us."





There'll be a lot more of that in the years ahead.




There is no discreetly arranged "Russian concession." Moscow has
concluded that a nuclear Iran is in its national interest — especially
if the remorseless nuclearization process itself is seen as a testament
to Western weakness.




Even if the Israelis are driven to bomb the thing to smithereens
circa next spring, that too would only emphasize, by implicit
comparison, American and European pusillanimity. Any private relief
felt in the chancelleries of London and Paris would inevitably license
a huge amount of public tut-tutting by this or that foreign minister
about the Zionist Entity's regrettable "disproportion."




The U.S. defense secretary is already on record as opposing an
Israeli strike. If it happens, every thug state around the globe will
understand the subtext — that, aside from a tiny strip of land on the
east bank of the Jordan, every other advanced society on Earth is
content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.





Some of them very strange.




Kim Jong Il wouldn't really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would
he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan's
nuclear arsenal, they wouldn't really do anything with them, would they?




Okay, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern
Europe, and his definition of "Eastern" seems to stretch ever further
west, but he's not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and
Budapest, is he? I mean, c'mon . . .




Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And
he thinks it's past time to reconstitute the old empire — not formally
(yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep
their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their
biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain.




Indeed, in some ways it marks the re-stitching of the Iron
Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal
in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden "technical
difficulty" that halved their gas supply from Russia.




The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more
energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too — in which every
city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is
in effect under the security umbrella of the new Czar. As to whether
such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good
luck with that, hopeychangers.




In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign-policy debacle
are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the
decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed
inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand
small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way.




A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during
the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as
"harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend."





In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they're drawing their own conclusions.





© Mark Steyn, 2009





http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=338162178241820

Smart man, Canadian too.

I thought this guy nailed it.

The world is always complaining about America meddling in the world's affairs, and being "the world's policeman".  They wanted a shy, ineffective America, well they got it!

Past life American?

Not all Canadians are idiots.

Steven Crowder is a good example of that.