It is perfectly obvious that Iran’s latest
uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains
more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues
enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent).
Which is why the French Foreign Ministry immediately declared that the
trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do
nothing to halt Iran’s nuclear program.
It will, however, make
meaningful sanctions more difficult. America’s proposed Security Council
resolution is already laughably weak – no blacklisting of Iran’s central
bank, no sanctions against Iran’s oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual
inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil – both current members
of the Security Council – are so opposed to sanctions that they will not
even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to
weaken it further.
But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export
stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the
mullahs’ nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined US efforts to curb
Iran’s program.
The real news is that already notorious photo: the
president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime
minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of
NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently
anti-American leader in the world.
THAT PICTURE – a defiant,
triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam – is a crushing verdict on President Barack
Obama’s foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional
American allies, having watched this administration in action, have
decided that there’s no cost in lining up with America’s enemies and no
profit in lining up with a US president given to apologies and
appeasement.
They’ve watched Obama’s humiliating attempts to
appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed US
negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the
president was late, hesitant and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical
support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and
whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most
significant US strategic advance in the region in 30 years.
They’ve
watched America acquiesce to Russia’s re-exerting sway over Eastern
Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25
years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over
Georgia (Russia’s de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no
longer an issue under the Obama “reset” policy).
They’ve watched
our appeasement of Syria, Iran’s agent in the Arab Levant – sending our
ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies
Hizbullah with Scuds and intensifies its role as the pivot of the
Iran-Hizbullah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of
the US and its interests? Ever more eager US “engagement.”
They’ve
observed the administration’s gratuitous slap at Britain over the
Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the
Czech Republic and Poland and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And
in Latin America, they see not just US passivity as Venezuela’s Hugo
Chavez organizes his anti-American “Bolivarian” coalition while deepening
military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active US
support in Honduras for a pro-Chavez would-be dictator seeking
unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that
country.
This is not just an America in decline. This is an America
in retreat – accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting
rising powers to fill the vacuum.
Nor is this retreat by
inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It’s
the perfect fulfillment of Obama’s adopted Third World narrative of
American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to
redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the UN
General Assembly last September that “no one nation can or should try to
dominate another nation” (guess who’s been the dominant nation for the
last two decades?) and his dismissal of any “world order that elevates one
nation or group of people over another.” (NATO? The West?)
Given
Obama’s policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally.
Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the US
retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela, why not hedge
your bets? There’s nothing to fear from Obama, and everything to gain by
ingratiating yourself with America’s rising adversaries. After all, they
actually believe in helping one’s friends and punishing one’s
enemies. – The Washington Post
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