How hard is it to be a world leader when you are president of the United States? How badly do you have to screw up to risk handing global leadership to another country? President Obama’s failure to seize the reins and live up to America’s legacy hit a new low after Vladimir Putin yanked those reins away over Syria. The Forbes slight giving the Russian president the number one leadership spot doesn’t mean much, but it is absolutely stunning that America permitted the Syria embarrassment to happen. This time it was not about our president believing America should take a back seat in the world community to atone for past sins. Obama was outfoxed, America was shamed, and Putin scored more points just after he granted asylum to Edward Snowden.
Community organizer makes a second rate world leader.
Yesterday’s weekly address proved nothing has changed since our president’s early days in Chicago. He still believes his job is to raise funds for the disadvantaged instead of growing the economy to help the less fortunate in the long term. Fundraising has its place and Barack Obama is good at it, but it won’t help him when he sits down with the likes of Vladimir Putin or China’s Xi Jinping, who made these remarks during a presidential press conference in California last summer:
China will work hard to realize the Chinese dream of the great national renewal and will work hard to push forward the noble cause of peace and development for all mankind.
By the Chinese dream, we seek to have economic prosperity, national renewal and people’s well-being. The Chinese dream is about cooperation, development, peace and win-win, and it is connected to the American Dream and the beautiful dreams people in other countries may have.¹
Sure it is. That dream is also connected to jerking the mantle of global leadership from under the United States, something our debt load and newfound naiveté about how things work in the world will help to accomplish (see: Leadership Crisis, Government Debt Cripple U.S. Influence). When a reporter at the press conference asked China’s leader about cyberattacks, America’s community organizer in chief responded with this:
When it comes to those cybersecurity issues like hacking or theft, those are not issues that are unique to the U.S.-China relationship. Those are issues that are of international concern. Oftentimes it’s non-state actors who are engaging in these issues as well. And we’re going to have to work very hard to build a system of defenses and protections, both in the private sector and in the public sector, even as we negotiate with other countries around setting up common rules of the road.²
When the world community is led by Russia and China, we can guess how those shared cybersecurity rules will be enforced.
America shamed again.
Does global leadership mean leading the community of nations or bowing to that community? The Obama vision for the world is a former community organizer’s wet dream played out on a global scale, subverting our world leadership to the community of nations in the mistaken belief that America’s interests will be protected if we all work together, allies and enemies alike.
The hits just keep coming on the international stage. Just telling the world America is sorry was, apparently, not enough. The Benghazi terrorist killings are forgotten and unanswered. Pakistan was awarded $1.6 billion in U.S. tax dollars and has responded by crying foul over the killing of a Taliban terrorist. The NSA has made a mockery of the super-transparent Obama administration and angered our European allies in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Syria? Who remembers? We never should have been involved but our president threatened military action and then backed off so Russia could call the shots.
America is being shamed again and again. How much more can we endure? We have three years to find out.
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