By Con George-Kotzabasis
As we had predicted prior to the election of Obama, Americans had picked a lemon for president. Both on the issues of the post-election turmoil in Iran and the START Follow-on Treaty in Moscow, Obama chose to take a weak position to ‘save’ his new diplomacy, as I foreshadowed he would do in a paper of mine, which if you wish you can read at Daring Thoughts
In the case of Iran, astonishingly, neither Obama nor any of his senior advisers were able to foresee the great potential for regime change that the revolt of the educated modernist forces of Iran were and are still fuelling for the near future, especially if the U.S. and its allies were prepared to take a stronger stand against the Mullahcracy and Ahmadinejad, as I had suggested to do in the above paper. Obama however chose to take the position of least resistance, not to “meddle” only to be accused later, as was expected, by the regime of meddling in the internal affairs of Iran. And the Group of Eight (G-8) In Italy this week, under the leadership of Obama, failed to reach consensus on tougher sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. “According to Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, the G-8 did not move for sanctions because the ‘conditions’ for tougher action against Iran ‘were not present.’ One can only marvel at the absence of such ‘conditions.’ Iran is not moving away from its intransigence in regard to its nuclear program, a large segment, if not the majority, of its population considers the Ahmadinejad regime as illegitimate and yet to the political savants of the G-8 these are not sufficient for harsher measures against the ‘imamocracy.’
In his negotiations with Russia, for the sake of an inutile unrealizable abstract goal of nuclear disarmament he sacrificed by putting in limbo the concrete goal of anti-ballistic missile defence of its European allies, in which technically the U.S. holds indubitable superiority. One can immediately see the farcical fallacy of Obama’s diplomatic overture to the Russians in regard to nuclear disarmament, which Obama in his press conference touted as a great opening for getting rid of nuclear weapons, when Moscow’s concern about the anti-ballistic shield was that it would be against its own nuclear armaments. If Russia in the future was willing to dismantle its nuclear armaments in reciprocation to America’s dismantling, why should it be concerned about the anti-ballistic shield set up in Poland and Czechoslovakia? It’s by such farcical diplomatic deeds that President Obama tries to dupe his American constituents that his new diplomacy is working.
But the great danger lies that by the time the lemon is squeezed dry America’s vital interests will be sacrificed on the altar of an erroneous and historically false diplomacy. A diplomacy whose end result will be on the one hand the strengthening of America’s foes and on the other the weakening of America, pushing it off its Archimedean point as a benign superpower which up till now was able to ‘tilt’ the world toward relative political stability and economic prosperity. And one can easily presage that the clever and duplicitous enemies of the United States will just as easily checkmate all Obama’s naive moves on the chessboard of diplomacy to the great detriment of American prestige and power.
