HURTLING DOWNHILL: RACHEL EHRENFELD
If recent events are any indication, the pace of U.S. withdrawal from the world and the extent of our fecklessness (and the West’s generally) in the face of threats coming from Islamist terrorism, Russia, China, and Iran promises to pick up in 2014. Something new pops up every day.
Al Qaeda and its various affiliates have made a great leap forward in Syria and Iraq, where the took over Fallujah. The Obama administration did not react apparently because it no longer sees al Qaeda as a threat. If Ramadi falls as well, there’s unlikely to be a response then either.
The fact that Syria has missed its chemical weapons removal deadline is largely ignored or excused by “unfavorable” weather and other “difficulties” to transport the chemicals for shipment. The Syrian civil war is being spread with Iran’s blessing as is growing Saudi intervention into Lebanon without apparent attention from Washington.
Iran’s growing intervention in Syria and Lebanon, the upgrading of Hezbollah’s missiles, which increases the threat to Israel, and assassinations of Lebanese Sunni leaders who dare to criticize Iran, fail to solicit any reaction from the U.S.
On nearly every foreign policy front, except the utterly fatuous and doomed promotion of Israeli-Palestinian peace, the U.S. is either doing nothing or backtracking.
There is no word at all from Washington on the status of the ballyhooed negotiations with Iran, while Tehran continues to issue new uranium-enrichment threats if it doesn’t get what the West said it would get at the Geneva meetings last Fall. Meanwhile, the sanctions regime is quickly disappearing and our European friends are energetically pursuing business and investments there, while travel industry leaders even picked Iran as one of the top-ten tourist attractions for 2014.
While Obama plays golf in Hawaii, the Benghazi affair is being attended to by his media accomplice, the New York Times, which has published a lengthy whitewash of administration responsibility that contradicts well-documented facts and conclusions. This, apparently, was done also to advance Hillary’s presidential ambitions.
The latest example of backtracking comes in a report that the Obama administration is refusing to enforce the Congressional “Magnitsky” legislation the president signed to sanction Russian rights abusers.
Yet, Congress and the public remain generally in denial about threats to world peace and stability-threats that will surely affect Americans both physically and economically. Our leaders refuse to speak about the growing Islamist threat or Iran’s aggression in the Eastern Mediterranean. The White House ignores the depredations of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, as well as Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist destabilization of democratic Turkey. No more protestation of Putin’s suppression of human rights and his anti-American diatribes. And Chinese threats to U.S. cyber security and our allies in the East and South China seas go unnoticed.
Why is this happening? Some blame the global economic problems that have unfolded since 2007 as the reason behind the U.S. taking the back seat. Others blame American politics and a total absence of foreign policy leadership within and outside the administration. To make things worse, the American and most Western media have totally abdicated their function as a Fourth Estate and now merely report gossip and whatever those in power want us to believe.
However, if recent polls showing that the public has lost its trust in government are correct, perhaps the realities of 2014 will force Congress-and even the media (sans the New York Times)-to slow the administration’s effort to abandon traditional and unique American values and pursue further the degradation of U.S. influence in the world.
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