Dangerous Precedents

Barrack Obama has bowed to enough foreign potentates, treated old allies rudely, and favored ruinous policies so routinely that it is impossible to retain in conscious memory all of even his most recent antics. Case in point: I'd managed to forget a recent Drudge Report headline about Obama selling out British nuclear secrets to Russia.

Fortunately, Thomas Sowell remembered this, and, taking it as his point of departure, he argues quite well that Obama is setting horrendous precedents for our national security on at least two levels.

First, regarding his betrayal of Great Britain, what kind of ally does this make us look like?

Glib talk about setting the reset button on American foreign policy raises the question whether any alliance with the United States can be relied on beyond the term of a particular administration. To nations that have to think in terms of their own national survival, four years is a very short time.

Second, and far worse, Obama's actions regarding Egypt (and I would say Britain, too) lend surface credibility to the left-wing trope of America-as-imperial-power:

Even in the worst days of the dictatorship in the Soviet Union, neither Stalin nor his successors publicly told the leaders of the satellite nations in Eastern Europe what to do. There is no question that Eastern European leaders were puppets of the Soviet Union, but Soviet leaders had the good sense not to say so to the whole world. Yet Obama makes allies look like they are puppets.

The philosophy of pragmatism, which makes range-of-the-moment morons out of so many of America's leaders, is thus easily seen to be not at all practical, given the temporal and moral blinders it places on them.

-- CAV