Obama Continues To Sell Out Our Allies In Order To Appease Our Enemies

The following is simplyyet another layer of icing on the “I-told-you-so-cake” I baked a long time ago.

Obama simply can’t stop selling out and undermining America’s closest allies in order to appease America’s enemies.  It is in his DNA.  It is what he is.

First, let’s start with our closest ally of all:

WikiLeaks cables: US agrees to tell Russia Britain’s nuclear secrets
The US secretly agreed to give the Russians sensitive information on Britain’s nuclear deterrent to persuade them to sign a key treaty, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
By Matthew Moore, Gordon Rayner and Christopher Hope 9:25PM GMT 04 Feb 2011

Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.

Defence analysts claim the agreement risks undermining Britain’s policy of refusing to confirm the exact size of its nuclear arsenal.

The fact that the Americans used British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called “special relationship”, which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website.

[…]

A series of classified messages sent to Washington by US negotiators show how information on Britain’s nuclear capability was crucial to securing Russia’s support for the “New START” deal.

Although the treaty was not supposed to have any impact on Britain, the leaked cables show that Russia used the talks to demand more information about the UK’s Trident missiles, which are manufactured and maintained in the US.

Washington lobbied London in 2009 for permission to supply Moscow with detailed data about the performance of UK missiles. The UK refused, but the US agreed to hand over the serial numbers of Trident missiles it transfers to Britain.

Professor Malcolm Chalmers said: “This appears to be significant because while the UK has announced how many missiles it possesses, there has been no way for the Russians to verify this. Over time, the unique identifiers will provide them with another data point to gauge the size of the British arsenal.”

Duncan Lennox, editor of Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, said: “They want to find out whether Britain has more missiles than we say we have, and having the unique identifiers might help them.”

While the US and Russia have long permitted inspections of each other’s nuclear weapons, Britain has sought to maintain some secrecy to compensate for the relatively small size of its arsenal.

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, last year disclosed that “up to 160” warheads are operational at any one time, but did not confirm the number of missiles.

This from the quivering pile of slime who sent back the bust of Winston Churchill that England gave America after 9/11 like it was junk.  I guess Obama felt like Churchill – a great man – was mocking the naive turd who was putting his feet up on the desk of the Oval Office.

Obama promised to restore American prestige that was somehow lost – according to the liberal narrative – by George Bush.  He has been an abject disgrace.

Also in the news that is going on before our very eyes, Barack Obama has turned his back on the Egyptian leader who has been a key American ally for presidents of both parties for thirty years.  And even uber liberals such as Chris Matthews are disgusted by Obama’s treatment:

“And Barack Obama, as much I support him in many ways, there is a transitional quality to the guy that is chilling.” He added, “I believe in relationships…You treat your friends a certain way. You’re loyal to them.”

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2011/02/04/chris-matthews-obamas-response-egypt-crisis-makes-me-ashamed-america#ixzz1DFDId2MT

The problem is that Obama is as loyal to his allies as a rattlesnake.  And his fangs are just as poisonous.

The special envoy that Obama himself picked to go to Egypt – and the former ambassador to Egypt – Frank Wisner said this:

“We need to get a national consensus around the pre-conditions for the next step forward. The president must stay in office to steer those changes,” he told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

“I believe that President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical – it’s his chance to write his own legacy.

“He has given 60 years of his life to the service of his country, this is an ideal moment for him to show the way forward.”

Wisner’s own many years of service to his country didn’t much matter in a fascinating turn of events in which Obama distanced himself from and recalled his very own special envoy.

But Obama doesn’t just undermine and backstab American allies; he appeases American enemies, too.  Obama went from specially inviting the pro-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood to his Cairo speech in 2009 to specifically embracing a role for the pro-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s new government.  Which has got to be salt in Hosni Mubarak’s wounds given the fact that he spent his entire life trying to prevent terrorist organizations from establishing a foothold in Egypt.

Israel – America’s second closest ally after only England which Obama has repeatedly screwed and spurned – also feels betrayed by Obama and shocked at Obama’s betrayal of Mubarak:

(Reuters) – If Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak is toppled, Israel will lose one of its very few friends in a hostile neighborhood and President Barack Obama will bear a large share of the blame, Israeli pundits said on Monday.

Political commentators expressed shock at how the United States as well as its major European allies appeared to be ready to dump a staunch strategic ally of three decades, simply to conform to the current ideology of political correctness.

Is Hosni Mubarak a dicator?  Of course he is.  And Joe Biden once again proved he is a fool for saying otherwise.  But the problem is that we’re going to end up with a dictator one way or another in Egypt because Muslims are ungovernable as a people by any other type of leadership.  The only question is whether it will end up with a pro-American dictator like it has had for thirty years or a viciously ANTI-American dictator like Iran that resulted from the last time a liberal president decided to naively prove what a fool he was in Jimmy Cater and the Ayatollah who replaced the Shah.

Obama is determined to dump Mubarak and is seemingly doing everything he can to make sure that the pro-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood take his place.

One day America will recognize that Barack Obama destroyed our most vital relationships to appease our worst enemies.  And got absolutely nothing for it.

This betrayal of American allies is nothing new to Barry Hussein.  He’s done it to many other former American allies, such as Poland, Czeckoslovakia and Georgia.  Like I said, it’s who he is.

But what else would one expect from the president of “God damn America“?

Obama Making World Safer For America’s Enemies

What would be an obvious follow-up for Obama’s well-received “Apologize for America” tour?

Why, a “Disarming America” tour, of course.

Barack Obama ready to slash US nuclear arsenal: Pentagon told to map out radical cuts as president prepares to chair UN talks

Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country’s arsenal, the Guardian can reveal.

Obama has rejected the Pentagon’s first draft of the “nuclear posture review” as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials. […]

The review is due to be completed by the end of this year, and European officials say the outcome is not yet clear. But one official said: “Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president’s weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role.”

The move comes as Obama prepares to take the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council on Thursday. It is aimed at winning consensus on a new grand bargain: exchanging more radical disarmament by nuclear powers in return for wider global efforts to prevent further proliferation.

That bargain is at the heart of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which is up for review next year amid signs it is unravelling in the face of Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions.

In an article for the Guardian today, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, argues that failure to win a consensus would be disastrous. “This is one of the most critical issues we face,” the foreign secretary writes. “Get it right, and we will increase global security, pave the way for a world without nuclear weapons, and improve access to affordable, safe and dependable energy – vital to tackle climate change. Get it wrong, and we face the spread of nuclear weapons and the chilling prospect of nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists.” […]

Barack Obama’s first foreign policy instinct is, as always, horrifyingly wrong.  When Russia recently invaded Georgia, committing ethnic cleansing and destroying democracy there in the process, Obama issued an incredibly weak, pandering, and yes, appeasing, statement which he later shifted to appear stronger than he was.

More recently, continuing the trend, Obama backed down to Russia’s threats and betrayed an American commitment to Poland and Czechoslovakia to “celebrate” the 70th anniversary of Russia’s brutal invasion of Poland.

Russia stared, and Obama blinked.  And cringed.

It is a crystal clear continuation to a program to alienate allies even as it bolsters enemies that I described months ago.  The world now sees America under Barack Obama as toothless as an enemy, and treacherous as a friend.

Now, this same man who vowed to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons – but doing absolutely nothing to keep them from this present moment as they now have the ability to make a bomb – is now basically saying that the only nuclear weapons he’s going to stop are OURS.

In his April 16th, 2008 debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama promised:

“I have said I will do whatever is required to prevent the Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons.”

But he did nothing.  NOTHING.  And now Iran has them at their whim.

And, in The Jerusalem Post’s words:

The Iranians have already called Obama’s bluff. An Iranian newspaper referred to the American agenda on July 26 this way: “[T]he Obama administration is prepared to accept the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran… They have no long-term plan for dealing with Iran… Their strategy consists of begging us to talk with them.”

Well, too bad the “begging” strategery didn’t work.  We had such high hopes for it.  We figured, well, it didn’t work when Neville Chamberlain tried it with Adolf Hitler, so it’s bound to succeed now.

Who would have thunk that such a weak and pathetic policy of appeasement would fail yet again?

Iran has been working on developing nuclear weapons for years.  It stopped its program in 2003, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, because they didn’t want to be next.  And the only “deterrent” which was ever going to have any chance of succeeding in stopping Iran’s nuclear program was the blunt promise of massive and overwhelming military force unless Iran verifiably cease its nuclear weapons program.  Which was never issued.

Now, this same man who vowed to stay tough in Afghanistan – and who is already buckling at the knees now that “the good war” is HIS war – is hard at work to undermine our national security even more by giving away our nuclear deterrent.

Charles Krauthammer recently cited Democrat strategist and Kerry ‘04 campaigner Bob Shrum’s describing Afghanistan as the “right war” as a tactic to attack Bush in Iraq while not being “anti-war.”  It was an incredibly cynical strategy from an incredibly cynical political party.  And it was a strategy that Barack Obama clearly embraced as well.  Frankly, anyone who believed that the Democrat Party would do the right thing for the right reasons in Afghanistan was simply deluded.

A recent article entitled, “Pentagon worried about Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan” ended with this assessment from a senior Pentagon official:

“I think they (the Obama administration) thought this would be more popular and easier.  We are not getting a Bush-like commitment to this war.”

And this is the guy who is making sweeping and fundamental changes to “radically” undermine our nuclear deterrent?

Obama Helps Russia Reassemble Iron Curtain

One of the things Obama has most wanted to prove was that he isn’t Bush — as though no matter how stupid his policies might be, as long as they aren’t Bush’s they must be good.

Well, Obama aint Reagan, either.

Obama appears to intend to not only roll back every Bush policy, but the fundamental victory of the Reagan presidency over the U.S.S.R.

Friday, September 18, 2009
Mark Steyn: Obama helping Putin restitch Iron Curtain
Scrapping of U.S. missile defense plans hands big victory to Russia’s new czar.

Was it only April? There was President Barack Obama, speaking (as is his wont) in Prague, about the Iranian nuclear program and ballistic missile capability, and saluting America’s plucky allies: “The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles,” he declared. “As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.”

On Thursday, the administration scrapped its missile defense plans for Eastern Europe. The “courageous” Czechs and Poles will have to take their chances. Did the “threat from Iran” go away? Not so’s you’d notice. The dawn of the nuclear Ayatollahs is perhaps only months away, and, just in case the Zionists or (please, no tittering) the formerly Great Satan is minded to take ’em out, Tehran will shortly be taking delivery of a bunch of S-300 anti-aircraft batteries from (ta-da!) Russia. Fancy that.

Joe Klein, the geostrategic thinker of Time magazine, concluded his analysis thus:

“This is just speculation on my part. But I do hope that this anti-missile move has a Russian concession attached to it, perhaps not publicly (just as the U.S. agreement to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey was not make public during the Cuban Missile Crisis). The Obama administration’s diplomatic strategy is, I believe, wise and comprehensive – but it needs to show more than public concessions over time. A few diplomatic victories wouldn’t hurt.”

Golly. We know, thanks to Jimmy Carter, Joe Klein and many others, that we critics of President Obama’s health care policy are, by definition, racist. Has criticism of Obama’s foreign policy also been deemed racist? Because one can certainly detect the first faint seeds of doubt germinating in dear old Joe’s soon-to-be-racist breast: The Obama administration “needs to show more than public concessions over time” – because otherwise the entire planet may get the vague impression that that’s all there is.

Especially if your pre-emptive capitulations are as felicitously timed as the missile-defense announcement, stiffing the Poles on the 70th anniversary of their invasion by the Red Army. As for the Czechs, well, dust off your Neville Chamberlain’s Greatest Hits LP: Like he said, they’re a faraway country of which we know little. So who cares? Everything old is new again.

It is interesting to contrast the administration’s “wise” diplomacy abroad with its willingness to go nuclear at home. If you go to a “town hall” meeting and express misgivings about the effectiveness of the stimulus, you’re a “racist” “angry” “Nazi” “evilmonger” “right-wing domestic terrorist.” It’s perhaps no surprise that that doesn’t leave a lot left over in the rhetorical arsenal for Putin, Chavez and Ahmadinejad. But you’ve got to figure that by now the world’s strongmen are getting the measure of the new Washington. Diplomacy used to be, as Canada’s Lester Pearson liked to say, the art of letting the other fellow have your way. Today, it’s more of a discreet cover for letting the other fellow have his way with you. The Europeans “negotiate” with Iran over its nukes for years, and, in the end, Iran gets the nukes, and Europe gets to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow have their way. “This is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our arguments about the reality of the threat or, rather, the lack of one,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma’s international affairs committee. “Finally the Americans have agreed with us.”

There’ll be a lot more of that in the years ahead.

There is no discreetly arranged “Russian concession.” Moscow has concluded that a nuclear Iran is in its national interest – especially if the remorseless nuclearization process itself is seen as a testament to Western weakness. Even if the Israelis are driven to bomb the thing to smithereens circa next spring, that, too, would only emphasize, by implicit comparison, American and European pusillanimity. Any private relief felt in the chancelleries of London and Paris would inevitably license a huge amount of public tut-tutting by this or that foreign minister about the Zionist Entity’s regrettable “disproportion.” The U.S. defense secretary is already on record as opposing an Israeli strike. If it happens, every thug state around the globe will understand the subtext – that, aside from a tiny strip of land on the east bank of the Jordan, every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.

Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? OK, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever further west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon …

Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire – not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden “technical difficulty” that halved their gas supply from Russia. The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too – in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.

In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.

I am still just as stunned by the Obama betrayal of a fundamental American commitment as the Poles and Czechs.  I mean, stop and think about it:

Obama announces his betrayal of Poland and Czechoslovakia on the anniversary of the inevitable result of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s selling of Eastern Europe down the river to Hitler and Stalin.  The rationale?  That Iran is farther behind on its ballistic missile technology than had been previously believed.

And, yet, on that very same day, we learn that a confidential report from the International Atomic Energy Agency says that Iran – contrary to previous intelligence assessments – can now make a nuclear bomb whenever they damn well want to.  And we become even more aware that the IAEA has been more intent on covering up Iranian (and before that Iraqi) development of weapons of mass destruction.

And my gosh, wasn’t it Democrats who kicked Bush for relying too much on intelligence assessments that can well be faulty?  Even when not only U.S. intelligence, but every single major intelligence service in the world, supported the primary conclusion that Saddam Hussein had WMD?  Why on earth does the same Barack Obama who as a candidate demonized Bush over trusting faulty intelligence on Iraq now so implicitly trust intelligence that Iran is not working on long-range missiles?

And then the very next day following that terrible 70th anniversary of September 17, 1939, Iran – which by the way can make nuclear bombs – shows just how insane they are by releasing a statement that denies the Holocaust occurred and vows that Israel’s days are numbered.

On September 17, 2009, President Barack Obama unilaterally abrogated a security agreement with two of its key Eastern European allies – who have been so loyal to America that they have kept troops in Iraq and Afghanistan – in order to appease an unfriendly Russia.  And the only thing worse than this capitulation to Russia is the despicable timing of said capitulation.

As Mark Steyn states in his title, this will result in a seismic shifting of Eastern European nations away from the untrustworthy United States and toward Russia.  All of Eastern Europe is in play: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Lithuania – and especially already-attacked Georgia – are now aware that they are basically on their own with a hungry Russian bear looming over them.

September 17, 2009 was a shameful day for Barack Obama and a shameful day for the nation that he represents.

Neville Chamberlain Deux: Obama Betrays Allies To Appease Enemies

For the official record, I have compared Barack Obama to Neville Chamberlain sixteen times in separate articles (seventeen counting this one).  British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was ruthless in advancing his domestic policy agenda, but became one of history’s most infamous appeasing weaklings in bowing down to Hitler’s threats and demands.  In seeking to avoid war at any cost, he guaranteed the worst war in human history – at least until now.

Prime Minister Chamberlain went to Munich expressing his desire to discuss a peaceful settlement with Germany under terms that included reneging on the British pledge to defend Czechoslovakia.  Jan Masaryk, the Czech Minister in London, called on British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax on the eve of the Munich Conference and said, “If you are sacrificing my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, God help your souls!”

Britain had betrayed Czechoslovakia for an empty promise that Neville Chamberlain naively believed would bring “peace in our time.”  Edouard Daladier took a more realistic view: “The fools,” he said bitterly, acknowledging the cheers of the crowds who believed Chamberlain’s statement.  “If only they knew what they are cheering.”

In one of those twists of historic irony that seem so commonplace in accompanying the greatest tragedies in human history, Barack Obama announced his betrayal of the previous American administration’s commitment to Poland and Czechoslovakia on the 70th anniversary of the bitter fruit of the Munich Conference.  It was on September 17, 1939 that Stalin’s forces streamed into Poland as a direct result of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasing betrayal and demonstration of weakness.

A Reuters article underscores the highly ironic timing of the Obama betrayal:

For Poland, the timing of the announcement is particularly sensitive. Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland following a pact between Moscow and Nazi Germany, an event seen by Poles as “a stab in the back.”

Is Obama even aware of the historic irony?  Probably not.  As Jules Crittenden points out, “The Obama administration doesn’t study history. It reimagines it.”

As usual, Obama has altered the facts on the intent of the missile shield.  It was – contrary to Obama’s assertion – not merely intended to protect the United States from a ballistic missile attack, but to serve as a bulwark against Russian aggression of eastern European countries (remember the recent Russian invasion of Georgia?).

Mr. Bush had developed a special relationship with Eastern Europe as relations between Washington and Moscow deteriorated. The proposal to deploy parts of the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic were justified on the grounds that they would protect Europe and the eastern coast of the United States against any possible missile attacks from Iran.

But the Polish and Czech governments saw the presence of American military personnel based permanently in their countries as a protection against Russia.

Poland and Czechoslovakia took a big risk trusting the United States instead of coming to terms under the sphere of hostile Russia.  And now they are revealed to have been fools for trusting the Americans:

“We have been hearing such things for a while now via different papers, from some conferences and so on,” said Waszczykowski, deputy head of Poland’s National Security Bureau which advises President Lech Kaczynski.

“This would be very bad. Without the shield we would de facto be losing a strategic alliance with Washington,” he said.

Michael Wisniewski, the Poland director of the Europa 21 foundation, expressed how Obama hamstrung the pro-USA movement throughout the entire eastern European region:

After 9/11 Poles expressed solidarity with USA without any hesitation. Despite the fact that we were risking alienation from some of our European partners. And after we joined US-led coalition against terrorism, we were verbally attacked by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Shroeder – leaders of two major European powers. But our position was clear and firm – we would stay with USA and fight against common enemies – enemies who attacked our ally and the whole free world. No other country had so special status in Poland – almost 80% Poles sympathized with US. Poland is not great military power – but have some influence on the eastern Europe and was a real stronghold of American interests in this region. Whatever Germans, French or other UE countries would do – Poland always stood arm to arm with US.

Now it belongs to the past. It’s not only about this incident, but it was something that created great outrage here. It’s impossible to remain so positive towards US now – people are reacting emotionally. Even most pro-US media and journalists comment, that our close relations with USA was mistake. That we were wrong and we should focus on our closer neighbours – like France or Germany.

The Obama administration announced its betrayal of Poland and Czechoslovakia – and the abandonment of the shared values that had framed their relationship with the United States – with a telephone call.  At least it wasn’t done via Twitter.

The Poles and the Czechs have the virtue of not being so stupid and naive as to fall for Obama’s beautiful lies.  They are not dancing in the streets over the announcement of their betrayal:

Poles, Czechs: US missile defense shift a betrayal

WARSAW, Poland — Poles and Czechs voiced deep concern Friday at President Barack Obama’s decision to scrap a Bush-era missile defense shield planned for their countries.

“Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back,” the Polish tabloid Fakt declared on its front page.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski said he was concerned that Obama’s new strategy leaves Poland in a dangerous “gray zone” between Western Europe and the old Soviet sphere.

Recent events have rattled nerves throughout central and eastern Europe, a region controlled by Moscow during the Cold War, including the war last summer between Russia and Georgia and ongoing efforts by Russia to regain influence in Ukraine. A Russian cutoff of gas to Ukraine last winter left many Europeans without heat.

The Bush administration’s missile defense plan would have been “a major step in preventing various disturbing trends in our region of the world,” Kaczynski said in a guest editorial in Fakt that also was carried on his presidential Web site.

Neighboring Lithuania, a small Baltic nation that broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991 and is now a NATO member, also expressed regret over Obama’s decision.

Defense Minister Rasa Jukneviciene said that the shield would have increased security for Lithuania and she hoped missile defense would not be excluded from future talks on NATO security.

“This NATO region cannot be an exception and its defense is not less important compared with others,” she said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he still sees a chance for Poles and Czechs to participate in the redesigned missile defense system. But that did not appear to calm nerves in Warsaw or Prague. […]

An editorial in Hospodarske Novine, a respected pro-business Czech newspaper, said: “an ally we rely on has betrayed us, and exchanged us for its own, better relations with Russia, of which we are rightly afraid.”

The move has raised fears in the two nations they are being marginalized by Washington even as a resurgent Russia leaves them longing for added American protection.

The Bush administration always said that the planned system — with a radar near Prague and interceptors in northern Poland — was meant as defense against Iran. But Poles and Czechs saw it as protection against Russia, and Moscow too considered a military installation in its backyard to be a threat.

“No Radar. Russia won,” the largest Czech daily, Mlada Fronta Dnes, declared in a front-page headline.

Any nation that has made any kind of a deal with the United States should seriously rethink the trustworthiness of their partner.  Because the American promise doesn’t mean a whole lot under this administration.

It appears highly likely that Obama is abandoning a U.S. commitment and betraying Poland and Czechoslovakia in order to get some kind of commitment from Russia to use its leverage to stop Iran’s nuclear program.  The only problem is that Russia is even less trustworthy than the new United States has become under Obama.

We’re not going to get squat from Russia that is anything other than a superficial and meaningless exercise.

Jennifer Rubin concludes her piece on Obama’s betryal of Poland and Czechoslovakia with this:

The administration that promised to restore our standing in the world is on quite a roll. Open hostility toward Israel. Bullying Honduras [link]. Reneging on promises to Eastern Europe. A strange policy indeed that dumps on our friends in the vain effort to incur the goodwill of our enemies. And if one is a “realist,” not a fabulist, it should be apparent that this is a losing proposition. We will lose our friends and gain nothing. Weakness and the betrayal of our allies do not ameliorate tensions with our adversaries. We had a Cold War topped off by the Carter administration to prove that. But Obama’s never been very good at history.

In April of last year I wrote this about Democrats and Iran near the end of the piece:

Allow me to guarantee you that a Democratic administration will see a nuclear Iran. Given their policy on Iraq, it becomes an implicit campaign promise. And it will see a nuclearized Middle East. Democrats have spent forty years proving that they are cowards who will not stand by their allies, and their actions will come home to roost.

And here we are: Iran can now make a bomb.

And neither Russia nor Obama are going to do a damn thing to stop it.

Looming War In Eastern Europe: Deja Vu All Over Again

For the historically literate, the picture of Eastern Europe today is disturbingly reminiscent of the view circa 1939. That was the year that Nazi Germany – having provided pseudo-justifications based on staged provocations – invaded first Czechoslovakia and then Poland. Throughout the entire period leading up to these military invasions, the Western world weakly stood by and did nothing but “dialogue.”

As hundreds of Russian tanks poured into his country, CNN reporter Susan Malveaux asked Georgian President Saakashvili:

MALVEAUX: Have you reached out to them? Do you feel there’s any room for negotiation or at least to begin a dialogue or discussions?

The problem has been that Russia has done its “negotiating” with tanks.

The UK Telgraph runs a story by Josh Bolton the editors titled, “The US fiddled while Georgia burned.” And this is undoubtedly true (as Bolton himself acknowledges). But at least the US’ “fiddling” involved doing something (in the sense of trying to get Georgia admitted to NATO, which would have circumvented this entire sad affair). Europe stood by and did absolutely nothing while Georgia burned.  And the so-called “cease fire agreement” that France proffered essentially allows Russia to remain in Georgian territory for as long as they like.  Many believe that the presence of Russian forces only a few miles from the Georgian capital is a naked attempt to topple the democratic government.

Just as with Iraq, European intransigence to sound diplomatic policy led to war. By refusing to accept the United States’ demand to require meaningful weapons inspections on Iraq, the U.N. in general and France and Russia in particular took every option but open war off the table for America. And by refusing to allow the U.S.-backed Georgian bid to join NATO, our European “allies” left a democratic and pro-Western former Soviet State vulnerable to precisely the sort of attack that totalitarian Russia launched.

Josh Bolton describes the European diplomatic initiative in shades of the infamous Munich Agreement:

The European Union took the lead in diplomacy, with results approaching Neville Chamberlain’s moment in the spotlight at Munich: a ceasefire that failed to mention Georgia’s territorial integrity, and that all but gave Russia permission to continue its military operations as a “peacekeeping” force anywhere in Georgia. More troubling, over the long term, was that the EU saw its task as being mediator – its favourite role in the world – between Georgia and Russia, rather than an advocate for the victim of aggression.

After Neville Chamberlain returned from signing the infamous agreement with Hitler, and appeasing an evil tyrant in the name of “peace in our time,” an embittered Winston Churchill observed:

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”

Josh Bolton believes that “the extent of the wreckage [of Georgia] reaches far beyond that small country.” He goes on to write:

The West, collectively, failed in this crisis. Georgia wasted its dime making that famous 3am telephone call to the White House, the one Hillary Clinton referred to in a campaign ad questioning Barack Obama’s fitness for the Presidency. Moreover, the blood on the Bear’s claws did not go unobserved in other states that were once part of the Soviet Union. Russia demonstrated unambiguously that it could have marched directly to Tbilisi and installed a puppet government before any Western leader was able to turn away from the Olympic Games. It could, presumably, do the same to them.

Fear was one reaction Russia wanted to provoke, and fear it has achieved, not just in the “Near Abroad” but in the capitals of Western Europe as well. But its main objective was hegemony, a hegemony it demonstrated by pledging to reconstruct Tskhinvali, the capital of its once and no-longer-future possession, South Ossetia. The contrast is stark: a real demonstration of using sticks and carrots, the kind that American and European diplomats only talk about. Moreover, Russia is now within an eyelash of dominating the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, the only route out of the Caspian Sea region not now controlled by either Russia or Iran. Losing this would be dramatically unhelpful if we hope for continued reductions in global petroleum prices, and energy independence from unfriendly, or potentially unfriendly, states.

It profits us little to blame Georgia for “provoking” the Russian attack. Nor is it becoming of the United States to have anonymous officials from its State Department telling reporters, as they did earlier this week, that they had warned Georgia not to provoke Russia. This confrontation is not about who violated the Marquess of Queensbury rules in South Ossetia, where ethnic violence has been a fact of life since the break-up of the Soviet Union on December 31, 1991 – and, indeed, long before. Instead, we are facing the much larger issue of how Russia plans to behave in international affairs for decades to come. Whether Mikhail Saakashvili “provoked” the Russians on August 8, or September 8, or whenever, this rape was well-planned and clearly coming, given Georgia’s manifest unwillingness to be “Finlandized” – the Cold War term for effectively losing your foreign-policy independence.

And now we are already beginning to see not only “how Russia plans to behave in international affairs for decades to come”, but right in the here and now.

In a statement about Poland that ought to send shivers up the spine of any thinking human being, a top Russian general added to the rhetoric of President Dmitry Medveded:

Only 24 hours after the weapons agreement was signed Russia’s deputy chief of staff warned Poland “is exposing itself to a strike 100 per cent”.

General Anatoly Nogovitsyn said that any new US assets in Europe could come under Russian nuclear attack with his forces targeting “the allies of countries having nuclear weapons”.

He told Russia’s Interfax news agency: “By hosting these, Poland is making itself a target. This is 100 per cent certain. It becomes a target for attack. Such targets are destroyed as a first priority.”

Russia’s nuclear rhetoric marks an intense new phase in the war of words over Georgia. The Caucasus conflict has spiralled into a Cold War style confrontation between Moscow and Washington in less than a week.

The stand off between the two cold War powers was underlined by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who dismissed US claims that the silo is a deterrent against ‘rogue states’ like Iran as “a fairy tale”. He told reporters at the Black Sea resort of Sochi: “The deployment of new missile defence facilities in Europe is aimed against the Russian Federation.”

Poland and a few other former Soviet Republicans who do not want to become future Russian republics are moving toward official relationships with the United States and Western alliances such as NATO. We must stop attempting to appease rogue and tyrant states for the sake of going along to get along in the short term and clearly and strongly back Western-leaning democratic states.

Again, Bolton is right on target:

Europe’s rejection this spring of President Bush’s proposal to start Ukraine and Georgia towards Nato membership was the real provocation to Russia, because it exposed Western weakness and timidity. As long as that perception exists in Moscow, the risk to other former Soviet territories – and in precarious regions such as the Middle East – will remain.

Obviously, not all former Soviet states are as critical to Nato as Ukraine, because of its size and strategic location, or Georgia, because of its importance to our access to the Caspian Basin’s oil and natural gas reserves. Moreover, not all of them meet fundamental Nato prerequisites. But we must now review our relationship with all of them. This, in effect, Nato failed to do after the Orange and Rose Revolutions, leaving us in our present untenable position.

By its actions in Georgia, Russia has made clear that its long-range objective is to fill that “gap” if we do not. That, as Western leaders like to say, is “unacceptable”. Accordingly, we should have a foreign-minister-level meeting of Nato to reverse the spring capitulation at Bucharest, and to decide that Georgia and Ukraine will be Nato’s next members. By drawing the line clearly, we are not provoking Russia, but doing just the opposite: letting them know that aggressive behaviour will result in costs that they will not want to bear, thus stabilising a critical seam between Russia and the West. In effect, we have already done this successfully with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Diplomacy is always worth pursuing. But diplomacy that is not backed with power and the willingness to use it is meaningless, and will always be recognized as such by tyrants and terrorists.

As we look at Russian totalitarian imperialism in Eastern Europe, and contemplate the looming menace of a nuclear-weapons-armed Iran, we must realize that much of the world is in the same mindset that the world was in in 1938. Only by recognizing that we must stand strongly against such developments will we be able to avoid the next catastrophic global harvest of death.

This is as certain as the fact that World War III follows World War II.