Depending on your prospective this is either diplomacy or the end of America.
The meme against Obama by those who are of the mindset to be against him & his policies is already set in stone, and it is to repeat what have you done for me lately as often as possible, while casting any attempt at doing or saying anything as further proof that there’s some sort of grand plot to turn the United States into a dictatorship that’s so unbearably socialist that Stalin will look like he provided over free market capitalism by comparison.
…and I forget, is that with ACORN as the shock troops, or was it the turnout to Obama’s repeated calls for an increase in volunteerism?
Beyond such stratospheric (and ironically derived from seemingly oxygen-deprived mindsets) spin follies also is found the call to announce that everything that is accomplished about the Obama administration as a failure. From their perspective, this administration has been and always will be 0-for-life when it comes to a scorecard of success. It would be what one would come to expect though from a loud minority who’s best of collection includes shouting the country’s way to a Bush victory in 2000 in Florida, reminding us that they hate us for our freedom and not our misguided wars against the wrong country, claiming that Kerry didn’t actually earn his Purple Heart, and my personal favorite: Katrina wasn’t so much about a disaster that had been warned about for decades and exposed what happens when important defenses to vulnerable cities are not maintained or built as well as they should be… but was rather about African Americans waiting for government handouts… from their rooftops… as people below them drowned.
Anyway.
See the problem here is that this just doesn't get you too far with anything, ever.
The failure these days, which we will hear more of as Obama makes the rounds on this planet as any world leader should, has to do with the complete undoing of American foreign policy. From this crowd we are greeted with the sentiment that America is pissing away all the diplomatic advantage that it held since the end of World War II – that we are willingly putting our security in the hands of others in order to appeal to the President’s base political support.
This comes from a group of people who don’t understand the intricacies of foreign policy beyond what they learned in Team America: World Police. As easy as the America, fuck yeah! approach to foreign policy sounds, it will never work. For additional research into this concept I invite someone on the fence about this to consult the military downfall of every empire in recorded history, and note how they nearly all result from over extension and belief that they are invisible to downfall.
To be fair, there are some intelligent ones involved in this great diplomacy debate who believe that everything Obama does is wrong. That’s fair. However, it’s also fair to say they are of the mindset that brought us such bright ideas as Project for the New American Century, which had such bright ideas of “regime change in Iraq, it won’t cost much!”, so I don’t believe there is a scoreboard large enough that can adequately sum up that failure in calculation.
On Obama’s recent swing through Asia (yes, the one that involved the bow that single handedly reversed the outcome of World War II) he managed to get into the ears of some of the Far East’s leaders. Some quick tea leaf checking ought to show how much of a failure this has been:
China Joins U.S. in Pledge of Hard Targets on Emissions
BEIJING — The Chinese government announced Thursday that it had set a target to slow the growth of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, a day after the Obama administration set a provisional target for reducing United States emissions.
Before this failure, China was thumbing its nose at any sort of emission limits.
China’s backing on Iran followed dire predictions
Two weeks before President Obama visited China, two senior White House officials traveled to Beijing on a “special mission” to try to persuade China to pressure Iran to give up its alleged nuclear weapons program.
If Beijing did not help the United States on this issue, the consequences could be severe, the visitors, Dennis Ross and Jeffrey Bader, both senior officials in the National Security Council, informed the Chinese.
The Chinese were told that Israel regards Iran’s nuclear program as an “existential issue and that countries that have an existential issue don’t listen to other countries,” according to a senior administration official. The implication was clear: Israel could bomb Iran, leading to a crisis in the Persian Gulf region and almost inevitably problems over the very oil China needs to fuel its economic juggernaut, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Not only diplomacy, but honesty: Israel has the potential to become an international loose cannon with dire consequences for the rest of us.
Now we’re to the bonus material:
Mainland may pull some missiles: Expert
Beijing might consider removing a portion of its missile arsenal in South China, a long-held precondition by Taiwan officials for peaceful cross-Straits ties, a mainland expert said Wednesday.
This could be much better than the way things were, which involved provocative war games by China and little dialogue.
RMB rate fine-tuning is possible
The vice-foreign minister said the RMB rate’s flexibility may widen, echoing the nation’s central bank a month ago.
The announcement by Vice-Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun comes after the People’s Bank of China, which has the power to oversee the yuan and financial institutions, said it was in the process of reforming the exchange rate system.
So, to review: no greenhouse gases have not been eliminated, no Iran hasn’t started thinking right, no Israel hasn’t guaranteed it will let cooler heads prevail, no Taiwan and China aren’t skipping through flowered fields in an embrace of everlasting love, and no the Chinese RMB has not doubled or tripled in value as it should, but on all these issues there is talking, and talking is synonymous with progress. In the ways that international diplomacy should play out, the longer you keep talking and the more things you talk about, the less likely the chances of relations growing cold, tensions rising, and bombs falling. It’s not perfect, there is no magic wand, but if this is the failure we can come to expect for the next few years then please, sign me up.
