American Decline: Success or Failure? Part 1

Written by Michael P. Pietromonaco

Nine months into the Obama presidency Charles Krauthammer wrote an article called Decline is a Choice. Being at the start of the Obama presidency he didn't have a lot of time to measure the consequences of the new foreign policy of the Left Liberal Ascendancy. After seven years I think there's been enough time to fairly examine its effects. Below is my assessment.

American Decline: Success or Failure?

Foreign policy: many Americans' eyes glaze over when you bring it up, the Democrats in their 1st debate didn’t even get asked about it. Yet as a democracy that chooses every four years the leader of the free world, and sole super power, it matters. Yet why should we be burdened with the thankless job of being a Super Power? Why not recoil from the conflicts of the world?

Simply put, under Obama, the United States would cease to act as a Super Power, taking a retracted, light footprint approach where necessary, retire the divisive rhetoric of Bush's War on Terror, Axis of Evil or Reagan's Evil Empire declarations, and finding some sort of accommodation and accord with adversaries would be the chief priority of American foreign policy.

Obama is no isolationist, he’s a committed multilateralist who’s foreign policy has been characterized by several key elements based largely on the European model of foreign policy: work multilaterally with the blessing of the United Nations and other international organizations, lead from behind relying heavily on supporting local forces, attempt to normalize relations with hostile powers through economic, strategic and diplomatic incentives and the negotiation of treaties, re-brand America as a humbled nation seeking redemption for a history of sins and unilateral warlike overreaction and striving to end all of its wars.

Well, we have tried all that to some extent in the last seven years so we can measure the results. The initial reaction was positive in some quarters. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize almost as soon as he was elected. Therefore, taking the Obama foreign policy region by region, strategy by strategy, is it a success or a failure?

Remember the famous “Russian Reset” Hillary Clinton tried to orchestrate under Obama? In Europe Obama abrogated the missile defense agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin got the message loud and clear, as did the rest of the world when Obama spoke into a hot mic while whispering quiet reassurances to Dmitry Medvedev, who didn’t even have to pass the message on to Putin as he promised because it was all over the news. Putin responded by seizing Crimea and invading the Eastern Ukraine, in the process causing us to abrogate our treaty with that Western friendly nation we had agreed to protect in exchange for allowing themselves to be defanged when we took their nuclear deterrent away. We failed to even provide the Ukraine with basic offensive weapons and intelligence. They asked, we said no. All we have done is to slap on some dubious and highly targeted sanctions and provide the Ukrainians with MREs, or as I like to call them, Meals Responsible for Emigration. Perhaps if the Ukrainians fed them to the Russians they could get them to leave.

The situation in Eastern Europe has gotten so bad that there are real fears that Russia will move against one of our new NATO allies in the East forcing NATO to flex its diminished muscles in a recent training exercise, as a way to discourage Putin from calling our Article 5 bluff. Meanwhile the Pols and the Baltic Nations tremble with fear and turn to the West to see an uncertain and disinterested America. All this while the Russians also hack us blind and are currently playing permanent host to the traitor, Edward Snowden and also get to charge us for ferrying our astronauts to the International Space Station because the first and only country to put men on the Moon now cannot even achieve near Earth orbit. The Russians also, against our wishes, stepped into the Syrian conflict and violated NATO ally Turkey’s airspace repeatedly until the Turks shot one of their planes down, risking war with the only nation on the planet capable of destroying us. True, cooler heads seemed to have prevailed, for now but we’re playing Russian Roulette with nukes.

Fail. 

With Cuba Obama has attempted to end the chilly relationship by normalizing relations with the island of tyranny. The result was we got no concessions from the Castros and they responded to our generosity by demanding Guantanamo Bay and reparations before sending troops to fight with their friends the Russians and Iranians in Syria.

Fail

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Look for Part 2 next week. We will explore Obama's foreign policy in the Middle East and more.

Make sure you subscribe to our blog and never miss an article. 

Is It All Just Another Vast Right Wing Conspiracy?

“This vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President…” — Hillary Clinton, January 27, 1998 

A storm is coming and you can already hear the wind picking up and see dark clouds on the horizon. First Lady Hillary Clinton once blamed her husband’s “Monicagate” scandal, that ultimately proved to be true, on a "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy." Yet the Right Wing isn't a conspiracy, it's a cacophony. Even at the time of the first (and, God willing, only) Clinton Presidency, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was ousted in a coup after leading a Republican revolution that bore his name a mere four years earlier. The Right Wing has been in disarray for a decade, ever since the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term, after the relative unity of his first term, and the Left, by in large, have reveled with delight in watching the circular firing squad as a myriad of Republican subdivisions from the Freedom Caucus, the Liberty Caucus and the Establishment go to war with each other in congress while the Presidential candidates, spurred on by a bellicose business man and reality TV star, mirror that battle in the presidential campaign. 

A Ryan Speaker-ship is the first dim ray of hope that the Republicans might be able to finally rally a dysfunctional GOP Congress together since the 2004 elections. A Rubio nomination could hypothetically strengthen this unity and extend it to the conservative electorate. So the answer is plain: both men must be savaged by a terrified Left Wing that faces the prospect of losing power after almost a decade of mismanagement and over promising and under delivering. 

Yet, let’s be clear, it won't be a Vast Left Wing conspiracy that launches the endless array of character assassination attempts. Only an adolescent, a paranoid or a demagogue (take your pick with Hillary) believes in "vast" conspiracies, it's simply because they all think the same and when an effective meme is generated it will go viral. Anyone who spends enough time on the internet knows how this works. These two men represent an existential threat to the Left, especially Rubio, who could stand to be the first Latino president. This makes no substantive difference but to a country obsessed with firsts and against Clinton, who markets her gender as if it were her greatest accomplishment, and most compelling justification for higher office, and with a still politically persuadable Latino demographic, it’s potentially a game changer.

So the Left will throw everything and the kitchen sink at them to see what sticks and what makes them bleed. Ryan and Rubio are human with all the corresponding frailties so this Crusade or, Jihad, against them will not be entirely fruitless, I guarantee, but it could prove quite petty. So far we know Ryan exaggerated his marathon record, Rubio misrepresented his family's reasons for leaving Cuba before he was born. Never mind Elizabeth Warren falsely claimed she had Native American blood and Hillary claimed to be named after Sir Edmund Hillary because of his climbing of Mount Everest 6 years after she was born. This is all just silliness and should be laughed off, except in the case of Hillary because of the sheer volume of whoppers and their substance, but eventually the Left will find something, possibly with a little help from Donald Trump, and they'll hold up their smoking gun be it a magnum or a peashooter, like they just found the murder weapon in a regicide, either that or it'll be death by a thousand cuts as we saw with Mitt Romney. That's politics. Just this past week, Trump began harping on Rubio’s possible misuse of a GOP credit card with a few purchases a decade ago. 

Hillary may have made up the snipers at the Bosnian Airport but the sniping coming Ryan and Rubio's way is quite real and they can't run and take cover, they have to just take it. That's what real men and women do. If they are, for the most part blameless, then they'll likely prove bulletproof and like, JEB with Rubio in the last debate, the snipers might get hit with a ricochet bullet fired from their own gun. Occasionally life provides a modicum of justice and a smidgen of irony.

By: Michael P. Pietromonaco

Is Leading From Behind Working?

Leading from behind? 

Libya and Iraq are in crisis because of that strategy. I think of it more as the Cheerleader Strategy. Now, like a punchline comes this story: Russian Gangsters try to sell weapons grade radioactive material to undercover agents hoping that they would sell it to ISIS and "Arabs" because they are likely to use it on the United States. See video below and full article here.

The weapons and materials were "stolen" from Crimea, where a weak president allowed a strong president (Happy birthday Mr. Putin, you shirtless Maniac) to grab that key peninsula from Ukraine, in spite of treaty obligations to protect the Ukraine's territorial sovereignty.

President Obama says that Putin is acting out of weakness... but it is because of Obama's weakness in Crimea and the Levant that we almost saw the most savage terror organization in history acquire highly dangerous material, which they of course would love to use on us, at home or our interests abroad. I can't think of a more poetic indictment of the Obama Administration's wobbly and incoherent foreign policy. Can you?

Now, those of us who were already unimpressed with how the US efforts in the Levant are going, are finding out that the reports about the 'War On Terror' (we don't say that anymore) have been getting cooked to make it look like it's going better than it actually is. Will it take another Pearl Harbor, another 9/11 to make us take Putin's Russia, Iran, and the Islamic State seriously? Seems some of my fellow citizens think so but I hope they're wrong. This Moldova bust is a wake up call, and it could have been a very rude one. The Moldovians think this will be the first of many attempts by the Russian mob to sell WMD material to the Islamic State. Maybe next time we won't be so lucky, and leading safely behind our hapless allies won't seem quite as safe as it used to.

Leave us a comment with your opinion, don't be shy. Make sure you subscribe!

By:  Michael P. Pietromonaco