Victor Davis Hanson - The Irony Of Obama's Fall To Earth - Granite Grok

Victor Davis Hanson – The Irony Of Obama’s Fall To Earth

How US elections have consequencesfor the world

NRO

Then came the waxen Obama soaring on hope and change, the president who would remake the world along the lines envisioned in a college faculty lounge or a Chicago organizing session. Obama was not a Buchananite isolationist who would be easy for Europeans to caricature. Rather, he is a postmodern, postracial progressive, who deeply felt either that traditional U.S. alliances were not worth the commitment, or that the U.S. was properly moving away from its European heritage and thus without any need for special trans-Atlantic relationships, or that an internationally engaged America came at the expense of dollars better spent on redistributive entitlements at home — or all three and more still.

The result is that the Europeans are increasingly bewildered if not a little anxious. They cannot reduce Obama, a man of the Left, to a caricatured Texan who often misunderstands the world, because Obama is an Ivy Leaguer who has never yet understood it.

They cannot whine about American ubiquity, because Obama agrees with their rhetoric that the U.S. should recede from the world stage. They cannot out-left America, because Obama is to the left of almost all the European leaders. And they cannot offer any more sermons about being patient with the world’s aggressors, because Obama is not so much patient as uninterested. Without an engaged U.S., Bashar Assad, Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communists, Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, the unhinged North Koreans, and radical Islamists could not care less about what the E.U. thinks or about the consequences of its much-hyped soft power. In sum, Europe cannot play Athens when there is no longer a Rome to back it up. The result is a sort of sad update of Stalin’s thuggish but instructive rhetorical question to French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval when the latter in 1935 suggested that the Soviets reach out to the Catholic hierarchy in order to thwart Hitler: “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?

Hanson offers a gold-mine of other observations in the piece.  It is well worth your time (unless you are into non-intervention, then you won’t like it much at all).

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