Under Obama, America is a shell of its former self

Investors Business Daily
Sep 25, 2013

Weakness: After weeks of kowtowing to Iran’s tyrants, President Obama couldn’t so much as get Hasan Rouhani to shake his hand at the U.N. Tuesday. Seems the mullahs still have a knack for detecting weakness in U.S. leaders.

Has the U.S. ever fallen in global stature as far and as fast as it has under the Obama administration? Not even Jimmy Carter drew so many snubs, insults and slights from world leaders in such a short period as Obama has in this past month.

Tuesday, Iran’s new president, Hasan Rouhani, who carefully cultivates a PR image as a “reformer” despite his close ties to the mullahs, blew off no less than three attempts by President Obama to shake his hand at the United Nations. The Iranian tweeted that he was meeting with the presidents of Austria, Pakistan and France instead. He literally told the leader of the Free World his busy schedule just wouldn’t permit it.

Let that sink in: Iran is in deep doo-doo internationally because of its illegal nuclear program. And America is the one nation that might just be in a military position to stop it — and its leader has better things to do ?

The only way this could happen is that the Iranians perceive America as pathetically weak. They’ve been good at detecting our weaknesses since way back in 1980, when they fought the feckless President Carter.

There’s a lot in the Obama White House to support that conclusion.

Obama’s phony claim of a red line to attack Syria over the use of chemical weapons on its people, and his unwillingness to follow up on his own words, was a big sign a paper tiger was in the room.

Then Russian President Vladimir Putin crudely disguised his effort to shore up his Syrian ally, Bashar Assad, by offering to disarm his chemical weapons. Instead, it reinforced the notion of U.S. weakness, in part because Putin’s gambit strengthens Russian influence in the region at our expense.

Obama’s relief at not having to attack Syria as promised was made worse after he absurdly declared Putin’s power grab somehow was his own diplomatic win.

After that, Brazil canceled a state dinner with the White House, stating its displeasure with recent revelations of National Security Agency surveillance.

Instead of expressing disappointment or maybe disbelief at Brazil’s naivete or exposing an operation or two of Brazil’s here, Obama went along, saying the cancellation was a mutual decision. Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, made a scorching speech directed at America for the mullahs to hear at the U.N. on Tuesday.

All these cave-ins come after many of the foundational bricks of U.S. foreign policy have been systematically knocked out by Obama in the past five years.

America under Obama has treated its truest allies such as Britain and Israel poorly. It has shucked others who served our interests, such as Egypt’s Mubarak, embracing instead enemies, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Iraq was abandoned to please the anti-war lobby at home, leaving a vacuum for Iran to fill.

Now America fights a rear-guard action to keep a presence in less strategically useful states such as Jordan.

He’s also failed to follow up on policy promises, such as his “pivot to Asia,” despite claiming he favored an economic approach to diplomacy. The weak U.S. economy is another flag to the mullahs of a crippled giant.

Worse still, Obama has permitted a massive military drawdown that’s hit the Navy particularly hard, leaving it bereft of its warships that project power.

And Obama’s weak handling of the case of NSA renegade Edward Snowden, letting him take asylum — along with his stolen, hacked American secrets — in Russia, leaves a U.S. shorn of secrets as the Russians gloat.

Knock the foundations out, and it doesn’t take long for the whole tower to come down.

Rouhani’s failure to shake hands with Obama was a major warning that the mullahs see America as weak. This can only be followed by worse behavior to come as world tyrants are emboldened.

“Weakness,” former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once said, “is provocative.”

We’ll soon find out just how right he was.