Via Pamela’s Atlas Shrugs, I bring you former US Ambassador to the UN, Mr.John Bolton, who helps to illuminate the message George W Bush delivered at the Israeli Knesset last week. It might be the “defining moment” the Republicans were waiting for.
The notion that one can use a technique as a foreign policy, is as naive as one can get, Bolton provides the reasoning as to why it’s so.
Bolton: “President Bush’s speech to Israel’s Knesset, where he equated “negotiat[ing] with the terrorists and radicals” to “the false comfort of appeasement,” drew harsh criticism from Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders. They apparently thought the president was talking about them, and perhaps he was.
Wittingly or not, the president may well have created a defining moment in the 2008 campaign. And Mr. Obama stepped right into the vortex by saying he was willing to debate John McCain on national security “any time, any place.” Mr. McCain should accept that challenge today. The Obama view of negotiations as the alpha and the omega of U.S. foreign policy highlights a fundamental conceptual divide between the major parties and their putative presidential nominees. This divide also opened in 2004, when John Kerry insisted that our foreign policy pass a “global test” to be considered legitimate.
At first glance, the idea of sitting down with adversaries seems hard to quarrel with. In our daily lives, we meet with competitors, opponents and unpleasant people all the time. Mr. Obama hopes to characterize the debate about international negotiations as one between his reasonableness and the hard-line attitude of a group of unilateralist GOP cowboys.
The real debate is radically different. On one side are those who believe that negotiations should be used to resolve international disputes 99% of the time. That is where I am, and where I think Mr. McCain is. On the other side are those like Mr. Obama, who apparently want to use negotiations 100% of the time. It is the 100%-ers who suffer from an obsession that is naive and dangerous.
Negotiation is not a policy. It is a technique. Saying that one favors negotiation with, say, Iran, has no more intellectual content than saying one favors using a spoon. For what? Under what circumstances? With what objectives? On these specifics, Mr. Obama has been consistently sketchy.
When push comes to shove in the upcoming months, B.Hussein Obama’s naivety concerning US foreign policy will come to haunt him. The Republicans have every reason to be encouraged about Obama’s upcoming nomination for President by the Democrats. *L* KGS
