Say Anything Blog

The ceding by Obama of eastern Europe to the Soviets may be a mild exaggeration but eastern European countries such as Poland and The Czech Republic have relied on the USA for protection since the days when they escaped Soviet domination.  By Obama’s cancelling of our previous committment to provide a missile shield for Poland and the Czech Republic we have affectively told those countries to deal with the Russian bear and any other threats to their sovereignity as best they can.  Mark Steyn states it best like this:

Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire – not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden “technical difficulty” that halved their gas supply from Russia. The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too – in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.

In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.

Whether he realizes it or not Obama is forcing our former allies to establish other alliances to protect themselves.  If Obamas bungling foreign policies continue, our country will lose whatever significance it has in the world and will find itself more and more an isolated non-player.  This may please the isolationists and the welfare liberals but will not make our country safer by any stretch of the imagination.