America’s allies are growing restless, David Ignatius warns.
“Is President Obama an American version of Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader whose well-intentioned reforms led to the demise of his country’s global power? That’s the anxiety a traveler hears these days from worried U.S. allies, and it’s mirrored in a provocative new article.”
Which American allies are telling this to the “traveler,”* you ask? Well, um, none of them, if you actually try to make sense out of Dave’s latest whine. He quotes, at length, from a “provocative” aka ridiculous article by Walter Russell Mead, claiming that Russia, China, and Iran—“the alliance of weevils,” ha ha—are ganging up to overthrow the U.S. Even Dave has to concede that Walt is “too pessimistic,” which is a hypocrite’s way of saying “this is total bullshit but I really needed to get this column done before the Redskins game.”
As for America’s allies, Dave quotes an unnamed “well-connected Arab” who quotes an unnamed Iraqi official, “furious at what he sees as U.S. abandonment”—said “abandonment” being forced on the Bush Administration as the result of the wholesale slaughter of Iraqi civilians by trigger-happy U.S. mercenaries, but who remembers “history”?— “I wish I could sue the Obama administration for criminal negligence.”
Well, there’s nothing more convincing than third-hand rage, is there? Dave also nods towards the Saudis, mad at us because we won’t pull their chestnuts out of the fire and invade Iran for them, which, Dave acknowledges, is probably not a good idea.
It’s more than a little pathetic that Ignatius can claim to see the slightest resemblance between Obama’s America and Gorbachev’s U.S.S.R. The Soviet economy was an inconceivable sinkhole, while our not so great economy of 2013 still compares very well with any in the world, including China’s.† Our “allies” like Saudi Arabia and Israel are mad at Obama not because he’s weak but because he’s strong: he doesn’t need them and doesn’t need to do their bidding. The U.S. is much stronger now than it was in its supposed glory days when we were wasting hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives in massively destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or has Dave forgotten all of that? Or does he just want to get paid big bucks for recycling nonsense?
†If the U.S. were “more like China,” as so many wish, the Obama girls would be living in $20 million villas on the Riviera, riding around in Ferraris, and basically making Lindsey Lohan look middle class. Give me the dysfunctions of democracy any day.
