“I believe in American exceptionalism,

[4est_4est_Gump]

just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism [and maybe the Russians in Russian Exceptionalism].”
Barack Hussein Obama
Strasbourg, France

Has Russia gone rogue?

Information revealed last week indicates that it has, and that because of the reckless weakness of Barack Obama, America now faces a neo-Soviet Russian bear primed for aggression, just as in the era of the USSR.

Last week, the spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee, Vladimir Markin, announced that Russia is now a vigilante nation. He stated: “And if not a single state in the world is capable of admitting the evident facts that Ukrainian authorities have been acting as criminals, Russia’s Investigative Committee will shoulder this responsibility by opening a criminal case.”

So in other words, Russia will act alone to arrest and punish leaders of foreign governments whom it declares guilty of “crimes,” no matter what the rest of the world may think about it. This from a nation that routinely demands that the U.S. bow to international organizations in places like Syria.

In the Wall Street Journal, seasoned Russia expert Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute took a crack at analyzing this new brand of neo-Soviet Russian exceptionalism. He highlighted how Putin has disturbingly offered comments tending to imply the superiority of the Russian race, comments he’s been offering the world for years now. Aron feels that Putin’s “recent rhetoric harks back to Russia's two most reactionary rulers: the 19th-century czars Nicholas I and his grandson, Alexander III.”

Russia’s profound hypocrisy in relentlessly attacking the USA for exceptionalism while embracing the notion fully itself is palpable, and its military onslaught leaves no doubt about its pretensions to its own brand of scary exceptionalism. And Russia is getting away with it because of Obama’s even scarier brand of craven weakness.

Since Obama came to power, Russian military spending has more than doubled, while U.S. spending as a share of GDP has plummeted by one fifth. The result was that in 2013, Russia passed the U.S. in military outlays as a share of national income, investing nearly as much in weaponry and troops as Germany and Britain combined.

Immediately after seminal event occurred, an emboldened Russia launched a bloodthirsty war of aggression against Ukraine, which borders many NATO members, whom the U.S. is bound to defend as it would itself. At the same time, Russian exceptionalism, buoyed by stark racism, burst forth upon the world.

While Russia’s total financial outlay is still well less than a quarter of U.S. spending, that disparity is deceptive, because many Russian costs, especially manpower, are far lower in a country that thinks nothing of paying workers slave wages and providing them with substandard medical care.

And Russia has a second major advantage over America, which the world saw clearly displayed as Russian tanks rolled into Georgia in 2008 and into Ukraine this year: Russia has a ruthless, almost feral willingness to use military force, regardless of risk, where one sees only hesitation from the likes of Obama.

It is that hesitation, combined with Russia’s relentless spending, that accounts for Putin’s reckless imperialist aggression.

Obama justified his massive cuts in military spending by claiming that Russia was a different country now, no longer an foe of freedom and democracy, and therefore should not be thought of as an American enemy. He embarked upon a bold “reset” policy designed to prove this to the world.

He failed miserably. The net result of the Obama “reset” [Hillary's 'Overcharge'] was that the leading Kremlin critic, Alexei Navalny, was silenced with criminal charges, the internet came under siege, and Russian tanks rolled into Crimea, annexing it from Ukraine just as Hitler annexed the Sudetenland.

Kim Zigfeld, American Thinker

 

[RobDownSouth]

Oh wow, an American Thinker hit piece!

Here, on the General Board, of all places!

Who could have imagined that?

 

[Ishmael]

I still remember from the debates the contemptuous laugh that Obama greeted Romney's remark about Russia being a serious foreign policy problem.

Ishmael

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I still remember from the debates the contemptuous laugh that Obama greeted Romney's remark about Russia being a serious foreign policy problem.

Ishmael

And now that they are the defenders of Western Christendom and of the Christians in Syria, the RUssians feel they hold the moral high-ground over the secular and decadent NATO countries who appear to be adopting the idea that Islam is an unstoppable force...



... howls from the 'exceptional' in 5, 4, 3...,

 

[Ishmael]

And everyone on the left is trying to treat the naked Russian aggression in Eastern Europe and the more subtle Chinese aggression in Asia as if they are two separate, unrelated, and merely coincidental events. <shrug>

Ishmael

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Did you mean to leave Iran off that list?

 

[Ishmael]

Did you mean to leave Iran off that list?

They're our buddies now, aren't they?

Ishmael

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

They're our buddies now, aren't they?

Ishmael

All I keep hearing is that they are contained and abandoning their nuclear ambitions, but I take that with a grain of salt because it comes from the same people who declared al Qaeda decapitated and on the run...

... of course, we just recapitated several of their heads.

 

[Ishmael]

All I keep hearing is that they are contained and abandoning their nuclear ambitions, but I take that with a grain of salt because it comes from the same people who declared al Qaeda decapitated and on the run...

... of course, we just recapitated several of their heads.

The marvels of modern medicine.

Ishmael

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

America and Europe are demoralized and infected with defeatism from the top. I heralded and got confirmation that the elites want to yoke and shackle the middle class (entrepreneurs) to a born again feudalism where all but Chelsea Clinton are villains bound to the WALMART manor.

 

[phrodeau]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxfzm9dfqBw#t=2m58s

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

America and Europe are demoralized and infected with defeatism from the top. I heralded and got confirmation that the elites want to yoke and shackle the middle class (entrepreneurs) to a born again feudalism where all but Chelsea Clinton are villains bound to the WALMART manor.

The problem is that they will just not let go of the Economics of the Socialists of the Chair, the Historical School and the idea that an economy can be modeled mathematically in a set of linear equations.

That and that technology abrogates actual human behavior.

 

[RobDownSouth]

The problem is that they will just not let go of the Economics of the Socialist of the Chair, the Historical School and the idea that an economy can be modeled mathematically in a set of linear equations.

That and that technology abrogates actual human behavior.

^^^ Random Capital Letters add gravitas To your Post.
:nods:

 

[Que]

All I keep hearing is that they are contained and abandoning their nuclear ambitions, but I take that with a grain of salt because it comes from the same people who declared al Qaeda decapitated and on the run...

... of course, we just recapitated several of their heads.

"Recapitated"- I like it.

Oh wow, an American Thinker

Read The American Thinker a lot, to have formed such strong opinion of their content?

Read the article?

Have some "Thinker-ing" of your own to enlighten us with?

^^^ Random Capital Letters add gravitas To your Post.
:nods:

Rob's hoped for Epitaph: "He nodded with such gravitas."

Perhaps he could have put quotation marks around the names of a couple of schools of economic thought, but the capitalization was not random, Mr. Grammarian.

For example: "The Austrian School of Economics" is not a school, nor is it located in Austria. "The Keynenian School of Economics" is not a school, and if it had a headmaster named John Maynard, he would not recognize it today.

You choose the oddest expostulations. Reminds me of the guy that was fake-signing Obama's speech. Lots of arm waving, no meaning.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Keynesian School is not in Kenya?






Maybe if the President DID speak Austrian, he would understand the economics better.

 

[Byron In Exile]

I have derived joy from this thread.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Happy happy joy joy?

 

[Byron In Exile]

But that's not an endorsement of either side.

I think that Giger's death was an impact.

Some genius died... but all my best friends are also dead... so why did it affect me?

It was nothing.

Carry on.

(rhymes with carrion)

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I discovered yesterday that my protege did not realize that virtually every single Pink Floyd album was about the descent into insanity...

 

[Busybody]

I still remember from the debates the contemptuous laugh that Obama greeted Romney's remark about Russia being a serious foreign policy problem.

Ishmael

not just Obama....the MEDIA as well

when Benghazi went down, the issue was WHY ROMNEY TALKED OF IT and NOT OBAMAS MURDER OF THE 4!

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Chinese certainly think that they are the most exceptional people on earth.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The final acts of the Obama foreign policy will play out in the next two years. Unfortunately, bad things happen when the world concludes that the American president has become weakened, distracted, or diffident about foreign policy.

As Richard Nixon became increasingly paralyzed by Watergate in late 1973, the enemies of Israel felt that it was an opportune time to launch their so-called Yom Kippur War. The next year, the negotiated armistice in the Vietnam War collapsed, and the North Vietnamese seized the Mekong Delta and prepared for a final offensive against South Vietnam.

In 1979, after two full years of Jimmy Carter’s reset foreign policy — and after the president’s “malaise” speech and the surreal attack by the aquatic rabbit — various risk-takers concluded that the United States had decided that it either could not or would not intercede against aggression. In short order, the Chinese invaded Vietnam; the Sandinistas seized power in Nicaragua, and Central America descended into a Communist miasma; the Iranians took U.S. hostages in Tehran; terrorists stormed Mecca; the Soviets invaded Afghanistan — and, after that last event, President Carter confessed that he had undergone “a dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are.”

Sometimes lame-duck presidents understand that they are perceived as weak or under siege — and yet can recover with resolute action. Iran–Contra by early 1987 had almost fatally damaged Ronald Reagan. But he rallied to negotiate with Gorbachev and promote policies that would lead to the fall of the Soviet Union. By late 1998, Bill Clinton was facing impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but a strong economy and his insistence on intervening in the Balkans against resurgent Milosevic forces saved his presidency. Despite Katrina, the disastrous 2006 midterm election, and popular opposition to the Iraq War, a weakened George W. Bush rallied to save Iraq through the surge and to cobble together punitive measures against Russia after the invasion of Georgia.

We are on such a precipice now, as the perception grows that Barack Obama is mired in scandal, an economy that has been stagnant throughout his tenure, and a disastrous foreign policy. It does no good to speculate whether critics at home are right in thinking that Barack Obama is “weak” in his foreign policy. Nor is there any point in arguing whether Obama believes that the U.S. is exceptional only in the relativist sense that Greece believes it is exceptional, or whether, as he stated more recently, he believes the U.S. is exceptional in absolute terms “with every fiber of [his] being.”

The point is not what we Americans think. Instead, the world abroad, fairly or not, has concluded after five and a half years that the Obama administration is both sanctimonious and absolutely risk averse. Translated, that means the administration likes to give sonorous and platitudinous sermons that needle both our friends and our enemies, but without any intention of seeing them followed by consequences. When Obama in a variety of ways assures the world that he is not George W. Bush, this does not always reassure America’s allies that he is resolute or warn our enemies that he is formidable.

...

For a variety of reasons, our European and Pacific partners privately sense that the American-led postwar global order is eroding and that regional hegemons like China, Iran, and Russia are filling the gaps. The Mideast badlands seem to be expanding into Egypt, Syria, and Libya. Iran wishes to do to the Middle East what Russia is doing to the former Soviet Union.

The surge had saved Iraq, and now the post-surge skedaddle is losing it. South America is increasingly regressing into leftwing statism and authoritarianism, assured that the United States either doesn’t care or privately likes its new trajectory. Al-Qaeda is hardly on the run; instead, it is spreading, partly on the suspicion that the United States with neurotic predictability seeks novel ways of not offending radical Islam. When al-Qaeda’s Dr. Zawahiri hears of overseas contingency operations, man-caused disasters, the Muslim-outreach efforts of NASA, jihadism as a personal journey, Guantanamo virtually closed, or civilian trials for terrorists and then not, he is not convinced the U.S. is ready to strike at the first sign of Islamist terror. China believes that the Obama administration is symptomatic of U.S. decline and without the wherewithal to protect its Pacific allies.

Aside from al-Qaeda–sponsored terrorism, there are lots of hot spots around the world that could flare up in the last two years of the Obama administration. Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the rest of the periphery of Putin’s Russia; Taiwan, the air and sea space surrounding Japan, the Vietnam-China border, the 38th parallel; Cyprus and the Aegean; the hostile neighborhood of Israel; Iran with its defiant nuclear efforts; and on and on. Some authoritarian rogue state or terrorist in the next 30 months may well risk aggression, on the expectation that never in the last half-century has there been a better opportunity to readjust the status quo. When Obama proclaims that climate change is now the most pressing American foreign-policy challenge, many bad actors abroad feel relieved — as if coal burning rather than aggression is about the only sin that might anger America.

Before Obama leaves office, we will see either some sort of Carter-like about-face in U.S. foreign policy, or aggression of a sort not seen since 1979 — or both.

Victor Davis Hanson, NRO

 

[Ishmael]

Before Obama leaves office, we will see either some sort of Carter-like about-face in U.S. foreign policy, or aggression of a sort not seen since 1979 — or both.

A seriously dangerous situation has been created by this administration.

The first mistake, and one that continues to this day, is the fact that Obama has allowed domestic politics drive his foreign policy. For all of Bush's faults, and they were many, he cannot be accused of that particular fault. Even FDR, arguably one of the most domestically populist presidents in recent history, didn't allow domestic politics to drive his foreign policy decisions. Even with overwhelming domestic support for isolationism he continued to prepare the nation for war. It could even be argued that his policies forced the issue.

So far his foreign policies have only managed to alienate our allies and embolden our enemies. He has consistently abdicated the US's leadership role in the confrontation of our adversaries. I can't help but wonder exactly which of our allies he expects to step forward to provide the lead? He seems to look to Europe for that leadership and in that I'm wondering exactly which of the European nations he wants to re-militarize?

The danger is that Obama will be forced to react to a situation and in that reaction he over reacts precipitating a needless, bloody, and expensive confrontation with a major power.

Ishmael

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

We should have paid more attention when he was extolling the beauty of the calls to prayer.