Russia Snubs Obama Overture
The president badly bungled his first effort at relations with Moscow.
There is no apparent indication of such concern on Obama’s part. Instead, one sees behavior that can only be perceived by the KGB thugs who infest the Russian Kremlin as weakness to be exploited. The notion that Russia can be relied upon as a partner in controlling Iran is ridiculous on its face, indeed childishly fanciful. Russia has a vested financial interest in supplying weapons to Iran and using the rogue regime’s threats as a way of destabilizing the oil markets and propping up prices artificially, all the while poking its finger into America’s eye. Russia is a country where the government is far more dangerous and corrupt than criminals, where courts obliterate rights rather than protect them, and where “elections” continue to be fully neo-Soviet in character. All that could possibly result from Obama’s overture is that Russian assistance to Iran will be driven underground; if the U.S. could not verify whether Iraq had dangerous weapons, it certainly cannot be sanguine about doing so where Iran is concerned. Meanwhile, partnership with America will be manipulated by the Kremlin for propaganda purposes to further undercut the reform movement in the country.
Even as news of Obama’s “secret letter” was breaking, it was also being reported that the gestapo-like goons who dare to call themselves “police” in Russia had arrested a large group of protesters who were foolish enough to publicly demand justice for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now facing double jeopardy as the Kremlin puts him back on trial a second time with the obvious intention of keeping him in prison for life. Obama’s actions virtually spit on all such brave Russian citizens and encourage others to keep silent. They imply that America will not intervene on their behalf.
The massive economic collapse Russia has experienced gives the U.S. an invaluable point of leverage it can use to force Russia to stand down from its outrageously threatening posture both domestically and internationally. It makes it possible for the U.S. to once again become a beacon of liberty that can inspire Russia’s oppressed population towards democratic action, and Obama is squandering that opportunity.
If he allows it to pass, history will condemn him
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Kim Zigfeld is a New York City-based writer who publishes her own Russia specialty blog, La Russophobe. She also writes about Russia for the American Thinker and for Russia! magazine and is researching a book on the rise of dictatorship in Putin’s Russia.
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51 Comments
1. Evil Pundit:I’m having a hard time deciding whether Obama is evil or just incompetent.
Mar 3, 2009 - 3:27 pm 2. GDT:I’m sorry kids, but what did you expect? Obama would bring about world peace through charm? The rest of the world is not as impressed as the American left. Obama is popular on the world stage BECAUSE he is seen as a weakening of the US. The rest of the world sees us as easy pickings as long as The One is in power. I hope we get lucky over the next four years. Because that, folks, is all we have.
Mar 3, 2009 - 4:04 pm 3. Alfredo:Mr. Pundit:
Incompetent, no doubt. Naive in extreme, especially when dealing with KGB thugs of the caliber of Putin, an avid chess player.
This is what a community organizer does as foreign policy; however, Russia is a bit different from even the politics of corrupt Chicago.
Moreover, Obama does not seem to handle well tough problems like this. I wonder if Hillary approved the letter. Like a certain peanut farmer before, the Russian will eat Obama alive if he let them
Mar 3, 2009 - 4:06 pm 4. jane:Obama is lazy and a narcissist. He’s also evil and incompetent.
Kim Zigfeld should have mentioned that Putin has given Obama, in recent weeks, a lecture on the hazards of communism.
Mar 3, 2009 - 4:07 pm 5. Vinny Vidivici:New York Times’ take:
“Russian Welcomes Letter From Obama”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/washington/04russia.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
Orwell lives. At the Times, that is.
Mar 3, 2009 - 4:08 pm 6. hinckleybuzzard:On the face of it, a stupid rookie mistake by a stupid rookie president. The fact is however, that America has a false-front presidency and foreign policy is of little significance to it. This not an ‘administration,’ as U.S. politics defines it. This is a slo-motion socialist domestic coup.
Mar 3, 2009 - 4:09 pm 7. Vinny Vidivici:GDT gets it: Of course America’s various antagonists, enemies and ankle-biters want us to elect presidents who are easily seduced by bespoke European diplomats, easily snookered by third world charlatans posing as men of the people, easily intimidated by totalitarian gangsters posing as statesmen, and easily guilted by redistributionist hucksters at the UN.
Too bad several generations of Americans have been taught that it’s better to be well-liked than to do the right thing, and that morality flows from consensus instead of conviction.
Mar 3, 2009 - 4:27 pm 8. Michael O'Brein:I’m starting to think he’s both evil AND incompetent, kind of like Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil character.
Mar 3, 2009 - 4:34 pm 9. Oscar the Grump:Give it time. Obama will legislate some bill here that will empress the Russians so much they’ll give us whatever we want.
Welcome to the real world Mr. President.
Mar 3, 2009 - 4:39 pm 10. DaveinPhoenix:Well isn’t it just great that the whole freaking world will love us now that Obama is the President. They won’t respect us, but boy, they’ll sure love us. Oh thank God. I’ve been losing sleep lately worrying whether Iran, Russia, and Venezuela love America anymore. Is this not the most naive President in American history ?
Mar 3, 2009 - 5:03 pm 11. Hyphenated American:With all due respect, I doubt Obama is that naive. He grew up in the jungles of Chicago – the man is a thug. The real explanation for his actions is simple – he is trying to show to the world that he is weak because he needs a war. Why does he need a war? He wants to be FDR, whose disastrous economic policies were masked by WW2. But unlike FDR, Obama is actually causing the war by trying to appear weak. This is my best guess.
Mar 3, 2009 - 5:44 pm 12. drjohn:This makes no sense. I just watched Katie Couric and Lara Logan tell me that Putin has just signaled that he wants to work with Obama and that this is a new era.
Of course, they said nothing about Putin saying there would be no “haggling.”
Mar 3, 2009 - 5:45 pm 13. Peter0000:American military technology for sale? This left wing ideologue truly has no clue. The military machine and superiority is being replaced by the Big 3 Green machines. That should put an end to those who would destroy us. GOD Help Us!
Mar 3, 2009 - 6:57 pm 14. Marc Malone:“No haggling.” means, “I won.” I have the power, and you don’t.
Anyway, what of it? During the campaign, we said this would happen, didn’t we?
Truthfully, I’d like to iron out spheres of influence with Russia. We let them take Georgia, and they let us take Cuba. We pay them to abandon Iran and to have them allow Kirgyzstan keep our airbase open. Something along those lines anyway.
Natch, it won’t be as bald as that, nor communicated so publicly. It’ll be more like, they invade Georgia, and we invade Cuba in retaliation. Then it all blows over, because we have to “work together” to contain Iran.
As for human rights in Russia (or China for that matter), I just don’t give a damn.
Mar 3, 2009 - 7:18 pm 15. Mongo:“The massive economic collapse Russia has experienced gives the U.S. an invaluable point of leverage it can use to force Russia to stand down from its outrageously threatening posture both domestically and internationally.”
I have to wonder what reality the people who write under the Kim Zigfeld pseudonym live in. It’s obviously not the reality where the US is facing economic collapse while engaged in two overseas conflicts. Its apparent they are willing to sacrifice everything; America’s economy, victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, keeping Iran from developing nukes; just to hurt Russia in whatever way possible.
Who cares that we need Russia’s cooperation to get supplies to Afghanistan? Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a man still worth roughly $500 million, is in a Russian prison! Who cares Georgia and Ukraine are corrupt, non-functioning disasters on the verge of economic implosion? Russia’s being mean to them!
The Kim Zigfeld writers’ Russophobia has deranged their minds and left them unable to think rationally.
Mar 3, 2009 - 7:25 pm 16. Oscar the Grump:I think its time for the US to court China into a mutual defense pact. I bet that would get Russia’s attention.
Mar 3, 2009 - 7:40 pm 17. Paul M Hupf:The President is naive. He has given away a strong bargaining point without obtaining anything in return. The Russians now know he is willing to give up on the “Missile Shield”. They won’t even talk to him unless he puts more on the table and all that before they concede anything. We have a child in the office of the President.
Mar 3, 2009 - 7:46 pm 18. zanne:We have a dreamer of a president. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride free.”
Mar 3, 2009 - 8:12 pm 19. James:“Russia Snubs Obama Overture”
Wow! Can the “Magic Mulatto” handle a snub?
Mar 3, 2009 - 8:28 pm 20. Kathryn (sign: Reagan Conservative Petition):Naive and therefore exceedingly dangerous. The world is more dangerous than when Jimmy Carter was president and we now have a president worse than Jimmy Carter.
We have to retake a majority in congress in 2010 to stop at least some of the stupidity of Obama. But Republicans MUST return to Reagan Conservatism to do it:
Mar 3, 2009 - 9:06 pm 21. SAF:http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/we-demand-true-conservative-leadership.html
I thought Obama would be Jimmy Carter II. So far he has certainly exceeded my expectations.
Mar 4, 2009 - 4:19 am 22. Jack:I find it amusing that he’s been President less than a month and you’ve all already decided he’s got a long track record that proves his *insert negative comment like “incompetence” here*. I thought you have all been saying that he has no experience…so are you guessing he’s incompetent or are you assuming he will be…I can’t tell.
It’s really hard to understand as it comes from the people who kept saying to not support the President was akin to treason, but now for some reason everyone wants him to fail and is calling him names and he he’s only served 2% of his Presidency…I’m so confused!!
Grow up a little people. I know you are still stuck in sour-grapes land, but none of us know how he’ll turn out yet and your hypocrisy is showing. It took Bush four years to show his full foreign policy, we can at least give Obama a few months before we judge it. You know I’m right, so either agree or remove yourself permanently from the conversation on the Obama presidency, because you are clearly so biased that nothing meaningul will come from you.
TYVM,
Mar 4, 2009 - 5:23 am 23. Kathy L.:Jack
What do you expect from a President who, on his first day on the job, announces he will free terrorists? God help us through the next four years.
Mar 4, 2009 - 5:53 am 24. Brian Richard Allen:Evil Pundit is having a hard time deciding whether the Left’s hero, Zero, is evil or just incompetent.
Why bother to ponder such an imponderable, though. Much more of the world’s evil is perpetrated and/or is facilitated by the incompetent than by the intelligent.
Brian Richard Allen
Los Angeles CalifOBAMBIcated 90028 — and the Far Abroad
(PS: Mumbles, the moronic, mobbed-up murtadd Muslim Marxist is both absolutely evil and abjectly incompetent)
Mar 4, 2009 - 6:58 am 25. Self-hating Boomer:They’re mutually exclusive? It takes a special kind of moron to be a fanatic. What he is is a teleprompter savant.
Mar 4, 2009 - 7:54 am 26. RW:Why would Russia agree to anything even with its rotten economy and crumbling military with Obama retreating from the world and showing the US will be absent from the world stage. He cares about implementing socialistic structures at home and merely asks for the status quo abroad re: keep buying T-bills China.
He sells out Poland and the Czech Republic after years of negotiations and those countries bravely staring down the Russian Bear in their own backyard. Obama showed no inclination to continue that policy or follow through on missile defense. Who needs those useless “unused” weapons anyway. Trade them in and pocket the money for more spending programs. That’s all that matters.
So our allies are now seeing what this means to them. Japan is now showing more aggression than ever since WWII with their intent to take out the North Korean long range missile. They know they are alone and will not watch themselves be undercut the way Obama did to Poland and the Czech Republic.
Meanwhile Russia looks at their economic woes, shrugs and says okay, let’s take down the 50 million people of a free Ukraine once and for all. Then we can turn our guns on the West and have Poland and the other countries laying at our feet begging for mercy.
Obama will do nothing. Okay, maybe he can do something like cancel US participation in an Olympics or something like Carter did. Meanwhile the Red Machine will roll on. And the bad players on the world stage like Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea will run amok.
A bad tempered Hillary won’t mean anything. Her boss as the world knows is feckless. By choice.
Mar 4, 2009 - 8:00 am 27. hp:ok, i’m missing something. yesterday msm was hyping this was a done deal. /sarcasm;
Mar 4, 2009 - 8:45 am 28. Steve J. Nelson:Exactly. If they can’t pay salaries in Kiev because the banks there failed, it must be evil Russia’s fault. Kim Zigfeld (and I suspect her real bosses Randy Scheunemann or the Jamestown Foundation) want to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian and Georgian.
Mar 4, 2009 - 9:00 am 29. Ian Thorpe:I wish Britain would snub Obama or Obama would snub Britain. Brown’s arse licking speech was embarrassing to our nation.
Mar 4, 2009 - 11:03 am 30. Kavkazwatcher:Obama’s announced policy coming into office was that if a more open- transparent government. What’s this “Secret Letter” to Medvedev we are all speculating about? Let’s get a copy of that letter and see for ourselves – or is he going to claim Presidential privilege on it? Now – let’s see of Obama can walk what he talks…!
Mar 4, 2009 - 11:54 am 31. jerryofva:Jack:
The good news is that I happen to agree with you that it is too early to judge Obama’s foreign policy agenda.
Now for the bad news. The real world does not give the President of the United States a grace period before he has to make decisions. Obama’s search for coherency is leaving him floundering in the face of real world challenges. Barak Obama was not ready on day 1 and will not be ready on day 365 because he will be engaged in constant crisis management. The only part of his foreign policy that is working is the part he inherited from George Bush.
Barak Obama was no more prepared for the foreign policy portfolio then Sarah Palin. The difference is that a VP Palin would have been President McCain’s understudy and after a year would have been fully capable of fleeting up to #1. Yet another truth about Barak Obama verified by experience.
Mar 4, 2009 - 12:11 pm 32. richard fusilier:This confirms my fears and suspicions. Obama doesn’t have a clue
Mar 4, 2009 - 1:06 pm 33. richard fusilier:and Hillary showed her ineptness and incompetence as usual.
Incidentally, Mexico is all right and everything is in tow with law and order. President Calderon is meeting the Challenges head on. The only thing alarming are the Billions of dollars being paid by China to enlarge the Port around Ensenada in preparation to flood the USA with goods shipped and transported North pursuant to the No. American Trade Treaty thru our frontier. Daily, truck loads of Japanese vehicles are now unloaded there and driven to the USA. for sale in competition.
The Iranian inpasse over Nuclear matters shows the great incompetence and ineptness of our State Dept. How long will Clinton last? She’s a joke!
Mar 4, 2009 - 1:12 pm 34. Jack:making a laughing stock of the USA.
jerryofva: Feel free to judge his decisions (as if you needed my approval) but I think to call him an abject failure of a President is going a bit far. As many republicans were fond of saying in the past 8 years, the guy IS the POTUS, you can try to maintain a little decorum and reflection when talking about him (some hinting that it was treasonous to openly disagree with him…much less *gasp* indicate you want him to fail while we are involved in two wars…).
Trash his decisions, trash things he’s said or done, but come on guys, your going over the edge is just a bit juvenile for people who care enough to post in places like this…That’s all I’m saying.
As to the wonderful foreign poliicy he inherited from Bush, I’m going to need some help. Is it the trade deficit, Iran working on nukes for 8 years, NK growing their arsenal, the peace in Isreal, the resurgence of the Taliban, the capture of Bin Laden, the ethnic cleansing by al qaeda connected leaders in Somalia, France still being a sovereing power, Russia sliding back into a cold war while they work with Iran and invade their neighbors, or the agreement we worked out where Mexico would control their side of the border? Which masterful policy created these things?
Jack
Mar 4, 2009 - 2:38 pm 35. Kt D:Personally, I think one of the largest questions with regard to any potential removal of missiles is whether or not Russia will honor its agreement to the U.S. From President Medvedev’s recent comments, it certainly does not seem as if he thinks the two issues are related. Since Russia gains much by being on good terms with Iran and would similarly lose much by isolating the country, the U.S. needs to be exceptionally savvy on what is being decided. I watched an interesting video on President Obama’s letter and his discussion with Medvedev. The newsy.com video summarizes a few different opinions and is worth watching:
http://www.newsy.com/videos/u_s_russia_trade_off/
Mar 4, 2009 - 4:15 pm 36. Thomas:The Iranian quandary is the sole creation of the Russians and the logical continuation of the pro-Islamist policy of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era. They armed before the Egyptians, Syrians since the 60-ties and they are determined to follow through on their Iranian plan more than ever.
Only these two idiots like the Kenyan boy and the incessantly giggling old hag think that the Russians give a hoot to 10 unarmed rockets – which are not even exist – when they have thousands nukes in service.
The primitive, unsophisticated way of thinking by this gubmint in strategic, military matters is abominable and horrifying.
To offer to give up something which is nonexistent in exchange for stopping something which is in advanced state is so absurd that even children would laugh at it.
Nothing proves better the veracity of my narrative than Putin’s reply who said “no haggling” which in Russian means F**k off dummies.
Mar 4, 2009 - 8:37 pm 37. Richard:I agree with most parts of the article, however Russia is no more interested in a nuclear armed Iran then United States is. Of course, they will not willing admit to this and its foolish and naive for Obama to negotiate this way.
Mar 4, 2009 - 11:13 pm 38. deguello:Why would Putin want to deal with an ignorant Chicago street punk, and racial racketeer?
Mar 5, 2009 - 5:31 am 39. jerryofva:Jack:
Obama inherited a successful war in Iraq and counterterrorism policies. Notice he will not change those. The Afghan surge was planned last year.
Funny how you cite Iran’s nuclear program as a failed policy because Bush pursued the very multilateral diplomatic approach with full cooperation from Europe that Democrats advocate. Your side did everything it could to undermine the military options up to and including the rigging of the key judgements in the Iran Nuclear NIE to undercut a more forceful policy. Tom Fingar lied with intent of preventing the Bush adminstration from taking military action to stop the program.
Since the Palestinian objective is the destrucion of Israel and the murder of its people and since Israel still exists the Bush policies were successful.
North Korea? Again a multi-national diplomacy failure under conditions advocated by the Democrats.
Mar 5, 2009 - 8:03 am 40. Jack:jerryofva – The Afghan surge wouldn’t have been needed if we’d stayed in Afghanistan and finished that war (the necessary one). So who planned the surge is immaterial. It’s too soon to tell if Iraq will be a success or not. The war wasn’t the hard part. Obama will take the heat if it fails, and Bush will take the credit if it works out. Time will tell.
Bush didn’t stop Iran from pursuing nukes, despite saying that the US won’t allow them to create them. He failed because they weren’t publicly working on them when he got into office, and they are now, and have had 8 years to do so (and expand capacity). So, he failed…that isn’t a judgement, it’s the recognition that he didn’t live up to his own stated goals. And it isn’t about what the democrats advocate…Bush did things his own way every time, especially when the military was involved, so don’t try to blame the Dems.
Your bar for success in Isreal is awful low. We can also thank Bush for preventing an attack by aliens too? Lots of Israeli’s and Palestinians have died over the past 8 years and his policies didn’t change anything over where we were when he got there, and I doubt his goals were around maintaining the status quo.
North Korea wasn’t pursuing nukes and had inspectors in their facilities, locks on the doors, and cameras on the locks when Bush came into often. One MASSIVE rookie foreign policy mistake later (axis of evil ring a bell) and all that changed (also what changed things in Iran). Bush had no more foreign policy experience than Obama has, and it showed.
I’m not defending Obama, but to claim Bush was such a success is simply laughable. I hope Obama does MUCH better (and yes, I’m concerned).
Jack
Mar 6, 2009 - 7:00 am 41. Steve J. Nelson:Jack,
Seems like a little bit of doublethink to me. Besides, the reality is that Afghanistan is even more screwed up than Iraq because Afghans never existed as a united country in their 2,500 year (going back to Alexander the Great) history whereas at least Iraqis had twenty years of governance before Saddam’s terror though they two probably shouldn’t have been lumped together by the Brits and now Kurdistan is de facto independent and Shiastan is under Iranian influence.
Furthermore, you know as well as I do that Pakistan is the real root of the problem, so all this talk about how Bush took his eyes off the ball and pulled troops out of Afghanistan is crap, like the equally fanciful notion that Bin Laden was cornered in Tora Bora and Bush let him get away when Bin Laden probably was sitting in Karachi when the first bombs fell on Afghanistan and wasn’t anywhere near there.
The Soviets couldn’t pacify the country with 100,000 troops, a fact Rumsfeld was well aware of and why he did not put more troops in there post-9/11, not just Iraq. And since we cannot outright invade a nuclear armed state that has a little Pashtun Ho Chih Minh Trail going, it’s going to be almost impossible to do much more than gain a modicum of stability and then get out. Or turn the whole thing over to the Chinese, it might give their mass of unemployed young men something to do. But there’s no oil in Afghanistan so I’m not sure how that will work, there’s a lot more in Siberia…
Huh? Do you really think the Iranians completely shut down the program in 2005 then suddenly restarted it just now? Get real. If that’s true, what does it say about how Iran feared Bush after we went into Iraq and what they think of Obama now? Or more likely, what does it say about how intel really was manipulated, to say that the Iranians are suspending their work under Bush but suddenly a year and a half later it’s ok to admit they have the capacity to build at least one nuke now that we know this President isn’t going to bomb them? I think you need to ask some harder questions of the “intelligence community” which has supposedly been manipulated by the evil BushChimpy Administration and ask if said manipulation was entirely a one way street or if the intel guys manipulated back (see Plame, Valerie for an example of made up claims and pointless exercises in the opposite direction).
Your North Korea Democrat talking points are a joke, the Norks had a covert uranium enrichment program going the whole time they had “locks on the doors” of their Yonbyon plutonium reactor, and as soon as Bush called them on it they kicked all inspectors out and resumed making plutonium for bombs. Maybe you think it’s impossible for nations to outsource WMD work to other countries, and those Iranian and Syrian scientists working in North Korea were there as tourists…or for that matter, Saddam didn’t send anything incriminating to Syria before the war considering he had months to dispose of the evidence, and that Syrian reactor the Israelis bombed a few months back was making baby milk. Whether we should have gone into Iraq even if Saddam was oozing VX out of his pores is an entirely different question, but let’s not pretend Saddam didn’t have the ability to make Bush look stupid by getting rid of everything, which is why basing the whole case for war around WMD was a huge mistake even if you think the war was justifiable.
There are idiots like Kim Zigfeld who want a pointless new Cold War with Russia, and then there are folks who mindlessly repeat Democrat talking points without actually thinking through what happens when the ball is in the court of their preferred politicians. Both are not so useful in these times.
Mar 6, 2009 - 7:56 am 42. Steve J. Nelson:Just remember guys that Kim Zigfeld is an anonymous sock puppet for old fart Cold Warriors who want to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, and have American boys ready to fight and die if the Crimea decides to secede from Kiev and rejoin Mother Russia, a country it was a part of for centuries.
These people almost got us into a second Cuban Missile Crisis with their attempt to turn Georgia into an anti-Russian client state in the Caucases. Beltway Bandits like Randy Scheunemann don’t give a damn about conservatism, the Republican Party, or even getting their bosses like John McCain elected, just keeping that gravy train going. And don’t believe Kim Zigfeld when she (he) says he wants to help the freedom loving people of Russia, Kim thinks the Russians deserve to die off and hand their country over to the Chinese already, who presumably will be more generous on oil and gas deals (Ha!)
Fortunately Kim Zigfeld (more likely, a middle aged dude, considering all the other sock puppets with identical language are male) is about to run out of money, so at least there’s a silver lining to this economic meltdown.
Mar 6, 2009 - 8:03 am 43. Jack:Steve J. Nelson – I don’t get your point about how much tougher Afghanistan is. Aren’t you then making my point that we should never have left there and that Iraq was a needless distraction?
And yes, Pakistan one part of the problem. And Bush didn’t handle that well either…he went the “make Musharaff an ally” route and never wavered…even after Musharaff proved that he either wasn’t capable or willing to do what needed to be done. Bush didn’t do anything about it…if we needed to go into a second country, it should have been Pakistan. But because they have nukes, Bush couldn’t and so he just did nothing. And, because we have insufficient troops there, Pakistan isn’t the only problem because the Taliban has plenty of territory withing Afghanistan (and growing by all accounts…hence the surge). Either way, it was badly mismanaged, which was my entire point there.
“Do you really think the Iranians completely shut down the program in 2005 then suddenly restarted it just now?”
First, I wasn’t talking about 2005, I was talking about 2001 when the Axis of Evil bomb was launched. Further, I did say that they weren’t “publicly” building nukes. The point was to say that Bush was so impotent (even after we got Iran to reach out to us in 2005) that they decided they didn’t even need to hide it. In fact, it became advantageous not to as they could look good in the region because they could stand up to the big bad Americans and they couldn’t do anything about it. That they went public with it should be an obvoius negative towards Bush.
Same point on North Korea. Even if they were working hard and fast covertly, they couldn’t go as fast as they could if they could do it publicly and without inspectors around (even they admit that). So thanks to Bush they went public, kicked out the inspectors, and accelerated the process. That was also a huge success for the U.S.
Again, I’m not saying how wonderful Obama is or will be on Foreign Policy, but to hear Republicans falling all overthemselves about “Bush the foreign policy wunderkind” just makes me wonder if this country will ever get it together. It’s turning into a sport where you defend your side whether it’s defensible or valid or just fun to do on a blog.
Jack
Mar 6, 2009 - 9:57 am 44. Marie Claude:I think its time for the US to court China into a mutual defense pact. I bet that would get Russia’s attention.
precisely, it’s what O is doing, didn’t Clinta made her first official trip there ? and O to Canada ?
how O snobbed the favorite “lèche-bottes” to the US ?
the wind reversed, Chineses are more useful, umm also this is the unknown happening, how the Chineses will take profit of this addubment ?
Mar 6, 2009 - 12:04 pm 45. Steve J. Nelson:Bush was not a glorious foreign policy success by any stretch. I’m just afraid Obama’s flailing about is going to make us nostalgiac for him, and that’s a terrible thing. Democrats always claimed out of power that they were super competent in power. Hell, they have a media that can always come up with fake claims, like that Bush let Bin Laden get away in Tora Bora or that Clinton had signed a secret order to kill Bin Laden despite legal administration claims to the contrary and Richard Clarke was right on it, to rewrite history and cover their butts when they screw up. I mean, super competent in foreign policy? We’ve already pissed off our best ally in Great Britain and made our Secretary of State a laughingstock in Moscow with translation. Tell me again how Dems are more wordly and sophisticated than the Rs just because so many were rooting for Obama to win this election…are they going to have buyer’s remorse now when Obama’s Administration inflates away the value of their dollar holdings, crashing the pound and euro with our currency?
But back to Russia and the Bushies. The Georgia War was the culmination of years of provoking Russia without thinking through the consequences of what would happen once the Russians finally pushed back.
Hank Paulson was in Moscow two months before Saakashvili marched on South Ossetia (an offensive that we could have hardly not noticed the preparations for, with our thousand U.S. Marines and contractors on the ground around Tblisi) pleading with the Russians to hold on to their Fannie and Freddie paper and other U.S. debt. The Russian had $70 billion in U.S. agency debt alone, but Cheney (and on the Democrat side, people like that old fart Z. Bzerzinski) wanted to refight the Great Game with them over Central Asian oil and gas (whaddya know, the U.S. and Russia refought the Great Game, but the Chinese won, laughing all the way to the bank at our stupidity). The propaganda machine against Putin only kicked into full gear when Misha Khodorkovsky went to jail for trying to sell 40% of the Russian oil industry to a consortium of Western oil majors.
So you are hardly talking to a Bush-Cheney apologist here.
Mar 7, 2009 - 10:21 pm 46. Ed:well at least Obama is trying to open communication channels with the rest of the world..the world is not used to talk to americans anymore..
the Bush administration kept boycotting countries and governments one after the other until WE are the ones who became increasingly isolated and unable to achieve anything..anybody rembers that annapolis international conference?..that was born dead?
we are not rewarding anybody by talking to them..understand this you republican thugs..this is the whole point of diplomacy which miserably failed thanx to loser Gondoleesa Rice..and thats how you achieve some of your goals..by the art of compromise..and take into consideration the interest of the other party..
anyway..as long as any american administration’s primary goal is to attack Israel’s enemies the world will not cooperate..
Mar 10, 2009 - 11:12 am 47. Nash:why dont we mind our own business in this tough time and stop favoring Israel’s national interests to ours????..after all the Russians are seeing to their national interests above all..
wonder what do they mean??..all those who are so upset Obama is pulling out from the international stage ..like we dont have enough problems to take care of at home?..
Mar 10, 2009 - 11:25 am 48. deguello:probably they have not lost any savings lately..nor they became unemployed..
in which world they live??..those folks want the soldiers to go fight and die in nonsense wars loosing trillions of dollars and thousands of lives..and they are even pushing for another war with Iran and a confrontation with Russia and China..
could someone please tell me?..isnt this how we ended up in this pathetic situation in the first place?..
ALL:WHY WOULD VITO CORLEONE TAKE A GUIDO PUNK FROM CHICAGO SERIOUSLY?
Mar 11, 2009 - 9:31 am 49. deguello:#47:Nash the answer is obvious to anyone. except to libtards like you;however, the real problem is:NASH YOUR BRAIN IS TRASH!
Mar 11, 2009 - 9:34 am 50. Gnasher:BUSH was the problem and Obama has the most difficult job in the world. Having to deal with the mess these politicans left.
Apr 26, 2009 - 4:46 am 51. knowledge:Russia has always been awkward with dealing with the rest of the world .
you guys who think you know so much sould just put a sock in your pie hole. you sound like some weak and defeated americans. support your president always and while you at it, grow some because it sound like nothing there down below, you know what i mean.
Jul 17, 2009 - 12:49 am