It's no surprise. I've been banging on and on about foreign policy for a while now (just click on the tags "HopeChange Chronicles" and -- duh -- "foreign policy"), and if you want a real MM rant, you'll get one if you ask me about how the Obama Administration treats our friends and allies. His foreign policy seems to be, in a nutshell, "coddle our enemies and screw our friends." It's nonsense on stilts. And horrifically dangerous.
ANYWAY, Daniel Hannan has his own rant this time, and it's a good one. I give you the bit about foreign policy, but you really should
read his entire rant.
His fondness for the EU is matched by his disdain for the United Kingdom. It’s not the diplomatic snubs that bother me: the dissing of Gordon Brown, the insulting gifts, the sending back of Winston Churchill’s bust. It’s not even the faux-anger towards the company he insists on calling “British” Petroleum. (No such firm has existed since the merger of BP and Amoco nine years ago. Thirty-nine per cent of BP shares are American-owned, and 40 per cent British-owned. The stricken rig in the Gulf is owned by Transocean, and the drilling was carried out by Halliburton, yet Obama isn’t demanding compensation from either of these American corporations.)
All these things are minor irritants compared to the way the Obama administration is backing Peronist Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands – or, as Obama’s people call them, “the Malvinas”. British troops were the only sizeable contingent to support the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have fought alongside America in most of the conflicts of the past hundred years. Yet, when the chips are down, Obama lines up with Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega against us.
Not that we should feel singled out. The Obama administration has scorned America’s other established friends. It has betrayed Poland and the Czech Republic, whose Atlanticist governments had agreed to accept the American missile defence system at immense political cost, only to find the project cancelled. It has alienated Israel and India. It has even managed to fall out with Canada over its “Buy American” rules and its decision to drill in disputed Arctic waters. Never has there been a worse time to be a US ally.
(How do you manage to tick off
Canada, that famously easygoing, friendly nation?)
"Never has there been a worse time to be a US ally"? Never have we needed our friends and allies more.
Hannan, by the way, had backed Obama during the 2008 campaign, but he has since stopped drinking the Kool-Aid. I guess this now means he's a gun-clinging, Bible-thumping, bitter, racist teabagging retrograde hater like the rest of us, heh. (Wake up, rest of you Obamaniac Europeans.)
Here's Hannan's parting shot: "His policies are serving to make his country poorer, less free and less respected. And that is a problem for all of us." No kidding, sir!
