THERE could be no more fitting ending to Barack Obama’s disastrous presidency than the two set-piece foreign policy events that took place in the US on Wednesday.
In their own ways each demonstrated just why the day cannot come too soon when this most overrated and inept president disappears from public office.
From The Express,
In Hawaii the soon-to-be former president took part in a ceremony at Pearl Harbor alongside Japanese PM Shinzo Abe.
According to President Obama, Mr Abe’s visit was a “historic gesture”. But there was not a word of apology from the Japanese leader for the outrage committed by his country in 1941
It was pure gesture politics – an empty shell of warm words and nothingness and as such entirely appropriate to the past eight years of the Obama presidency, which has placed meaningless gestures above serious action.
Meanwhile in Washington DC, John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, was again demonstrating the unique blend of incompetence, arrogance and pomposity that has repeatedly confirmed him as the most disastrously useless holder of that great office of state in recent memory.
For his final act as Secretary of State he chose to invite the world’s media to the State Department while he spent over an hour attacking Israel, the US’s staunchest ally in the Middle East.
In a region of despots and butchers, Israel is a democracy that observes the rule of law and all Western norms of human rights.
Three hundred miles from the Israeli border lie the victims of Syrian leader Bashar Al Assad’s massacres.
But while Mr Kerry and President Obama have responded to the murder and displacement of millions in Syria by standing by, their reaction to Israel building some houses in disputed land in East Jerusalem has been to launch the most ferocious verbal attack of the entire Obama presidency.
But betraying allies and standing by and watching while the enemies of freedom do their worst has been the hallmark of President Obama’s administration.
Infamously in 2012 President Obama declared that should the Syrian leader use chemical weapons it would cross a “red line” and the US would act.
That is exactly what Assad did. President Obama’s response was to do nothing – confirming that under his leadership, even when the US talked tough it acted weak.
In global politics such weakness has real consequences. When Russia invaded and took control of a large chunk of a sovereign European nation – Ukraine – in 2014, the US simply stood by, betraying assurances given to the Ukrainians in 1994 that if they gave up their nuclear weapons the US would guarantee the country’s “existing borders”.
Not only did he refuse to honour that guarantee, President Obama refused to supply the Ukrainians with arms to defend themselves against the Russian invaders. President Putin invaded Ukraine because he knew that the US was unwilling to defend its allies.
Read the full article at Express
