The U.S. and European Union imposed more sanctions on Russia Monday, and both the ruble and Moscow stock index rallied, the latter up 1.5%. The markets didn't take this response to the Kremlin's war on Ukraine seriously, and neither will Vladimir Putin.
On Friday, the Russian-sponsored warlords who hold the provincial city of Slovyansk took hostage monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. These are the monitors the U.S. insisted be allowed to oversee the truce Mr. Kerry negotiated only two weeks ago.Secretary of State John Kerry last week used blistering language to describe Moscow's actions in eastern Ukraine. He was right. Russian special forces and local separatists have stormed government offices and threatened journalists and opponents. Some were tortured, a couple killed. The independent mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, was shot Monday in an assassination attempt.
Yet President Obama delayed the announcement of new sanctions and then watered them down. The White House targeted seven more Russian officials, barring them from travelling or banking in the U.S., and it added 17 companies linked to Putin cronies who were already sanctioned. The EU followed on Monday by sanctioning 15 Russian and Ukrainian officials, but its list includes fewer top officials and no companies.

None of the Russian outrages in eastern Ukraine, with many to choose from, were sufficient for the Administration to go after prominent energy or financial companies. The Kremlin and the markets feared the U.S. would target Gazprom, an important instrument of Russian foreign policy and crony enrichment. VneshtorgbankVTBR.MZ +0.86% and Sberbank,SBER.MZ -0.80% the savings bank, are other arms of the Russian state that 
The one notable name on the U.S. list is Igor Sechin, a close Putin friend and a Kremlin hard-liner. Mr. Sechin runs the state-owned oil company Rosneft, whose best assets were plundered from Yukos, a private company destroyed by the Kremlin a decade ago. He joins a few other close Putin friends whom the Administration—in the one notably bold American move of the whole Ukrainian crisis—sanctioned five weeks ago, soon after the annexation of Crimea. His absence was an oversight corrected on Monday.
This round of sanctions is once again more notable for what wasn't done. GazpromOGZPY -0.41% boss Alexei Miller, who carried Mr. Putin's bags during his days atop the KGB in the late 1990s, was considered. President Obama took him off, according to several news reports.
might have been included.
Sanctions on entire sectors of the economy would be more effective and potentially damaging. In the end the Administration didn't even sanction Rosneft, taking away the bite of including Mr. Sechin. Rosneft's shares still fell 1.7% on investor concerns about the future of the company's ventures with BP BP.LN +2.92% and ExxonMobil.XOM +0.41% But Gazprom was up over 2%, Sberbank 5%. Call it Moscow's Obama rally.
The White House defends this "calibrated" approach as necessary to make sure Europe comes along. But Europe is always going to resist unless the U.S. is willing to go it alone, and then it may come along. That's what happened on Iran.
Sanctions only make sense if they cause enough economic pain to make Russians begin to question the wisdom of Kremlin imperialism. Otherwise they make the West look weak and disunited. This is exactly what Mr. Putin is counting on, and so far he's been right.


1b)The 'Don't Worry, Be Happy' President
By Ed Lasky

Presidents have been known for slogans that came to symbolize their agendas. There were the New Deal, Great Society, and New Frontier presidents. There was the president who spoke softly but carried a big stick.
Then there is the president who should be known from now on as the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” president: Barack Obama.
Very few of our presidents have ever been truly prepared to handle the rigors of the presidency, but most of them have risen to the challenge. The time period for Obama to do so expired long ago. His leadership has been consistently and willfully obtuse and oblivious to the duties and responsibilities of the presidency.
He has routinely dismissed massive problems and threats to Americans as being trivial -- beneath his God-like goal to halt the rise of the oceans. Instead, he has portrayed his stewardship as being exemplary -- one of the top four presidencies in history -- and conveyed in various ways we should not worry and be happy, if not be thankful to have him.
If ignorance is bliss, Barack Obama is one of the most blissful leaders in our nation’s history.
When David Letterman once asked Obama about the rapidly growing national debt Obama didn’t have the faintest clue regarding its size (Romney would have known to the penny). His budgets are not only repeatedly late but larded with even more spending, heedless of dire debt warnings from the Congressional Budget Office.
In the throes of the recession with many millions unemployed and businesses failing across America, he said private businesses were doing just fine (the only problem were there were too few government workers). But weren’t the trillion dollar stimulus boondoggle and those multitude of green schemes peddled by Democratic cronies supposed to create millions of jobs and lower the unemployment rate? One more promise down the drain, but it sure was grist for laughter when Obama later joked that it turns out there were no such things as “shovel-ready jobs.”  Real people with real jobs will be paying for this disaster for decades.
Don’t worry, be Happy.
But will future taxpayers be so happy?
How did Obama address the IRS scandal? At first, outrage suitable to the public mood. But as the stonewalling continued and the media served its block and tackle role for him, he dismissed its importance and declared there was not even a “smidgen of corruption” involved in that scandal -- even before the investigation was complete /.
Move on, the debate is over, be happy.
His signature achievement, ObamaCare (how Democrats refer to the Affordable Care Act depends on the audience), was “working the way it should,” Obama boasted  and claims that it is hurting people have been “completely debunked.”
President Obama certainly seemed in fine fettle when he declared the debate is over when final (and very suspect) initial enrollment numbers were released. Those people who have lost their insurance, doctors, preferred hospitals, cheaper premiums, and jobs might beg to differ (even though they are all liars, according to Senate Majority Leader (dirty) Harry Reid).
But Obama seems not to be worry and is happy since the program in his mind is working as it should, leading America towards nationalized health care.
Obama confidently and blithely declared America can absorb another terror attack (tell that to the victims and their families). This perspective is part and parcel of downplaying all violence committed by Islamic extremists -- hence the Fort Hood Massacre was an act of “workplace violence” despite the perpetrator screaming “Allahu Akbar” as he murdered Americans serving their country. Lest we forget at a press conference shortly thereafter Obama issued cheerful shout-outs to friendly journalists before deigning to mention the Texas tragedy. Benghazi was blamed on a video critical of Islam not on the terrorists themselves. While the attack was occurring, Obama took a break from the rigors of responsibility to rest up for his mega-donor fundraiser in Las Vegas the next day.
Obama has touted Al Qaeda’s demise at least 32 times and it is not on the path to defeat (it controls more territory than ever before). Yes, Osama Bin Laden is dead -- and Obama played cards with his body man, Reggie Love (how does one get a body man?) while our soldiers were risking their lives to bring him down.
Why worry? Be happy.
Iran is dismissed as a tiny country that poses no threat to America -- did our geographically challenged president (57 states, Hawaii is not in Asia, they don’t speak “Austrian” in Austria) ever look at a map? Did the self-declared student of history not comprehend all the Americans killed by Iran and its proxies (Beirut barracks bombing, Khobar Towers, Iraq)? He also said that Iran was not seeking to carry out terror attacks in America -- despite the plot to kill the Saudi and Israeli Ambassadors in Washington, D.C. that was widely covered in the news and had been uncovered just a few weeks before . True, he routinely skips daily economic, national security, and Cabinet meetings   but even his close friend Eric Holder knew this was an Iranian assassination plot.
Obama’s television addiction has been widely commented upon but his fare runs to fluff such as Mad Men, SportsCenter, Real Housewives, Jersey Shore, tons of HBO, and not, say, the actual news (to the extent he takes his news, it is “fake news” with a liberal slant via The Daily Show, where, White House spokesman Jay Carney recently informed us, he had his toughest interview.) He is glued to the Boob Tube -- video Chooming. Wallowing in popular culture certainly beats dealing with crises and being entertained pleases Obama -- he even feels entitled for advance copies of hit shows.
His insular presidency (he doesn’t like people)  is shielded from bad news by ego-protector Valerie Jarrett who buffers him from “critics and complainers who might deflate his ego” with bad news or reports of problems that might actually require him to work -- he has a problem with his work ethic, after all. It is far better for his mood to surround himself with a Team of Idolizers, as even the New York Times liberal columnist Roger Cohen notes has been done .
Don’t worry, be happy.
Russian invades Crimea (violating a twenty-year treaty) -- or as the White House politely describes it “uncontested arrival” (Roget’s Thesaurus must be the most useful book for the administration, so addicted to euphemisms -- too bad George Orwell missed this opportunity).
What does Barack Obama do in response? Emits some pabulum fed to him by his handlers and then moves on to a Democratic Party fundraiser where he declares before a cheering crowd, “Well, it’s Friday, it’s after 5:00. So this is officially happy hour with the Democratic Party” .
After all, Obama told a crowd, ”We never need an excuse for a good party” and and they certainly throw a lot of them-especially private musical concerts in the East Room. Imagine the blowout party when Iran detonates its first nuclear weapon.
Don’t worry, be happy!
Who is worrying? Ukrainians and people throughout Europe and the world who fear the run of the dictators has a long way to go. Who is happy? Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and that party of cheering democrats.
Well, why should Obama worry? After all, Obama tells us that Russia is a “regional power” and its successful invasion of the Ukraine was “acting out of weakness,” and  Ukraine is “not some Cold War chessboard” because the Cold War has been over for decades. When fighting erupted in the Ukraine, Obama immediately called the…coaches of the University of Connecticut basketball team to congratulate them on their championship.
Obama is still sticking with his wrong claim that Russia is not our number one geopolitical foe because to admit otherwise would be to confess that Obama was wrong and Romney was right, Barack Obama does not accept responsibility for mistakes so he routinely dismisses or downplays them. He ignores reality and lives in a personal, palatial Wonderland. He is happier there.
Not sure Vlad the Impaler or his victims would view it in the same way. By dismissing the threat, he absolves himself of responsibility. Even when he was compelled to draft some sanctions on Russia they were all but toothless and he went about the rest of his day being…happy.
Meanwhile, Russia violated the nuclear arms control treaty America had with it and the White House smothered the news and remained silent (if a tree falls in the forest…), while accelerating the hollowing out of our own military and speeding up the de-commissioning of our own nuclear weapons.
Obama has broken many promises to Americans but kept one promise -- to Putin: he would be flexible if he won reelection. Indeed, Barack Obama has shown the spineless flexibility of Gumby and our enemies have taken note.
The poker-playing President does not even try to bluff anymore (what red lines in Syria?). Geopolitical strategy 101 preaches the value of strategic ambiguity -- keep the other side guessing. Our foes don’t need to calculate Obama’s response to provocative actions on their part -- he gives them advance notice that military help for the beleaguered Ukrainians is not in the offing (he will send them snacks they can eat as they watch their nation, whose independence we had guaranteed, be dismembered); any sanctions will be weak and not a “threat or meant in a personal way” (via Obama’s proxy, John Kerry); “send the troops” has been replaced by send the tweets, and Obama even there is  being punked by Putin.
After all, it is in Obama’s interest to ignore treaty violations by our adversaries-just as he ignores Iran’s nuclear program, the breaking of our immigration laws, IRS scandals, Fast and Furious, the burgeoning entitlement crisis and myriad other problems on the horizon. If he acknowledged them he would have to work and work does not make him a happy camper.
How does Obama get away with all this feel good palaver? His most fervent supporters, millenials, get their news from Facebook and other social media. Tweets are the length of the attention span of many of them. And many of those tweets come from the White House and Obama’s own Organize for Action. Fox News is denigrated constantly.
While their fathers might have relied on Huntley and Brinkley, Reasoner, and, before them, Edgar Murrow and Eric Sevareid, they now get their news from comedians such as Stewart, Colbert, and Letterman. With the former, there was an obligation to report the news as faithfully as possible -- that was the standard anyway. But with our modern-day newscasters/comedians, the obligation seems to be to mock Republicans, get laughs and ratings and display proper servility to Democrats. The vast wasteland has arrived.
The traditional media has been (willingly) coopted. Most journalists are liberal and give the vast majority of their political donations to Democrats. Recently, the media has been in overdrive to hype the good news about ObamaCare while burying the bad news
-copying the Obama playbook.
And this servile behavior by the media suits Obama’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” approach to the presidency.
Why work? After all, he seemingly has no problem creating a nation of loafers and he most assuredly knows the appeal of such a life, as opposed to, say, working.
Far more enjoyable to play golf, live it up in the lap of luxury, fulfill the dream of every adolescent sports fan to tee off and play hoops with legends, be serenaded by music stars. Even the funeral of Nelson Mandela’s became an opportunity to smile and yuck it up for yet another selfie. This is a president who completely lacks self-awareness and respect for solemn occasions and the office of the presidency.
When the chickens come home to roost, as his moral compass Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Junior might put it, he will be long gone from the White House and they will be someone else’s problem -- as well as the problem of every American.
Famed literary agent Andrew Wylie has said that Obama’s memoirs could command $20 million and Michelle’s memoir (reportedly she is at work on it now) could ring the bell at $12 million. Round it up with speaking fees, board memberships, sweetheart investment deals, and the like and one can wonder why he just can’t build his own presidential library and not saddle Illinois taxpayers with the due bill.
 No wonder Obama could tout that he is not worried about the future of their daughters who are on the path of success: “they’re on a path that is going to be successful, even if the country as a whole is not successful.”  Nice to know at least they will be happy as Americans struggle to pay off the record debt and deficits racked up during the Obama era.
Come to think of it, why shouldn’t Barack Obama be happy? He has succeeded in his goal of fundamentally transforming America. And the rest of America will be left cleaning up the mess from his party.

1c)The problem with Barack Obama's foreign policy is Barack Obama
BY 

Former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis brought an old Greek saying into the political lexicon: "The fish rots from the head down."
It's the perfect metaphor for what passes for foreign policy in the Obama administration.
Facing increasing criticism of his handling of foreign relations, President Obama on Monday knocked down an entire infield's worth of straw men in a 949-word baseball-themed defense at a news conference in Manila, the last stop on a weeklong Asia trip. It's a good primer for the uninitiated on exactly how far out of touch the commander-in-chief is with the world scene:
Well, Ed, I doubt that I’m going to have time to lay out my entire foreign policy doctrine. And there are actually some complimentary pieces as well about my foreign policy, but I’m not sure you ran them.
Here’s I think the general takeaway from this trip. Our alliances in the Asia Pacific have never been stronger; I can say that unequivocally. Our relationship with ASEAN countries in Southeast Asia have never been stronger. I don’t think that’s subject to dispute. As recently as a decade ago, there were great tensions between us and Malaysia, for example. And I think you just witnessed the incredible warmth and strength of the relationship between those two countries.
We’re here in the Philippines signing a defense agreement. Ten years ago, fifteen years ago there was enormous tensions around our defense relationship with the Philippines. And so it’s hard to square whatever it is that the critics are saying with facts on the ground, events on the ground here in the Asia Pacific region. Typically, criticism of our foreign policy has been directed at the failure to use military force. And the question I think I would have is, why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force after we’ve just gone through a decade of war at enormous costs to our troops and to our budget? And what is it exactly that these critics think would have been accomplished?
My job as Commander-in-Chief is to deploy military force as a last resort, and to deploy it wisely. And, frankly, most of the foreign policy commentators that have questioned our policies would go headlong into a bunch of military adventures that the American people had no interest in participating in and would not advance our core security interests.
So if you look at Syria, for example, our interest is in helping the Syrian people, but nobody suggests that us being involved in a land war in Syria would necessarily accomplish this goal. And I would note that those who criticize our foreign policy with respect to Syria, they themselves say, no, no, no, we don’t mean sending in troops. Well, what do you mean? Well, you should be assisting the opposition -- well, we’re assisting the opposition. What else do you mean? Well, perhaps you should have taken a strike in Syria to get chemical weapons out of Syria. Well, it turns out we’re getting chemical weapons out of Syria without having initiated a strike. So what else are you talking about? And at that point it kind of trails off.
In Ukraine, what we’ve done is mobilize the international community. Russia has never been more isolated. A country that used to be clearly in its orbit now is looking much more towards Europe and the West, because they’ve seen that the arrangements that have existed for the last 20 years weren’t working for them. And Russia is having to engage in activities that have been rejected uniformly around the world. And we’ve been able to mobilize the international community to not only put diplomatic pressure on Russia, but also we’ve been able to organize European countries who many were skeptical would do anything to work with us in applying sanctions to Russia. Well, what else should we be doing? Well, we shouldn’t be putting troops in, the critics will say. That’s not what we mean. Well, okay, what are you saying? Well, we should be arming the Ukrainians more. Do people actually think that somehow us sending some additional arms into Ukraine could potentially deter the Russian army? Or are we more likely to deter them by applying the sort of international pressure, diplomatic pressure and economic pressure that we’re applying?
The point is that for some reason many who were proponents of what I consider to be a disastrous decision to go into Iraq haven’t really learned the lesson of the last decade, and they keep on just playing the same note over and over again. Why? I don’t know. But my job as Commander-in-Chief is to look at what is it that is going to advance our security interests over the long term, to keep our military in reserve for where we absolutely need it. There are going to be times where there are disasters and difficulties and challenges all around the world, and not all of those are going to be immediately solvable by us.
But we can continue to speak out clearly about what we believe. Where we can make a difference using all the tools we’ve got in the toolkit, well, we should do so. And if there are occasions where targeted, clear actions can be taken that would make a difference, then we should take them. We don't do them because somebody sitting in an office in Washington or New York think it would look strong. That's not how we make foreign policy. And if you look at the results of what we've done over the last five years, it is fair to say that our alliances are stronger, our partnerships are stronger, and in the Asia Pacific region, just to take one example, we are much better positioned to work with the peoples here on a whole range of issues of mutual interest.
And that may not always be sexy. That may not always attract a lot of attention, and it doesn’t make for good argument on Sunday morning shows. But it avoids errors. You hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run. But we steadily advance the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world.
So Obama prefers to hit line drives rather than swing for the fences, and claims that's helped him avoid errors. But that just isn't true. Let's take those errors point-by-point:
• The Philippines: The bilateral agreement signed Sunday can be summed up in one phrase: fear of China. That's what's driving Manila's reversal on hosting U.S. forces, along with the welcoming attitude by other nations around the South China Sea, most notably Vietnam. Obama acts as if his administration has caused the reduction in what he calls "enormous tensions," but his military budget cuts and weak response to aggression by rogue states are helping cause heightened anxiety across the Pacific, not reduce it. Also, U.S. special operations forces have been at work in the Philippines since the beginning of 2002, helping Filipino troops fight Islamist terrorists. ThePentagon calls the mission "Operation Enduring Freedom." If that sounds familiar, it should -- it's the same name used for operations in Afghanistan.
• Deploying military force as a last resort: One word: Libya. Obama deployed military force as a first resort, not a last, and did so without seeking congressional approval, as George W. Bush did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of the president's critics, rather than being eager to increase the use of force by the U.S., say that was a military adventure too far -- and their position has been bolstered not only by the assassination in Benghazi of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens in September 2012, but also the general chaos of post-Gadhafi Libya.
• Ukraine/Russia: Obama has misread Russia from the moment former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hit the "reset" button (which actually was labeled "overcharge" in Russian). When hedismissed Russia (which dominates the world's largest land mass) as a "regional power" in March, he ignored the many ways in which his own administration has put U.S. policy at Moscow's mercy --needing Russian rocket engines to launch U.S. spy satellites, for example. And Russia is by no means isolated: President Vladimir Putin is still reaping the rewards of courting U.S. adversaries such as Venezuela and Iran while Washington slept, and his influence in the Middle East has grown amid Obama's missteps. One of Obama's signature goals, nuclear nonproliferation, depends on Russian cooperation. Meanwhile, the Russians are openly mocking the president's sanctions and the State Department's pathetic attempts at social media diplomacy on Ukraine have drawn worldwide derision.
• "Our alliances are stronger:" It's not hard to find an example of a country where that isn't true: Britain, Israel and Saudi Arabia come to mind. Obama sold out the British with his neutral positionon the Falkland Islands, and scored a double play against Israel and Saudi Arabia with the interim nuclear deal with Iran. Maybe he's just talking about the alliances he really cares about -- but then there's the whole question of why he had to travel to Asia in the first place: to reassure jittery alliesin the region like Japan that he really will defend them.

Our enemies are gloating, and our allies are grimly deciding where to go from here. 
Barack Obama had a foreign policy for about five years, and now he has none.
The first-term foreign policy’s assumptions went something like this. Obama was to assure the world that he was not George W. Bush. Whatever the latter was for, Obama was mostly against. Given that Bush had left office with polls similar to Harry Truman’s final numbers, this seemed to Obama a wise political approach.

If Bush wanted garrison troops left in Iraq to secure the victory of the surge, Obama would pull them out. If Bush had opened Guantanamo, used drones, relied on renditions, reestablished military tribunals, and approved preventive detention, Obama would profess to dismantle that war on terror — even to the point where the Bush-era use of the word “terrorism” and any associations between it and radical Islam would disappear.

If Bush had contemplated establishing an anti-missile system in concert with the Poles and Czechs, then it must have been unwise and unnecessary. If Bush had unabashedly supported Israel and become estranged from Turkey, Obama would predictably reverse both courses.
Second, policy per se would be secondary to Obama’s personal narrative and iconic status. Obama, by virtue of his nontraditional name, his mixed-race ancestry, and his unmistakably leftist politics, would win over America’s critics to the point where most disagreements — themselves largely provoked by prior traditional and blinkered administrations — would dissipate. Rhetoric and symbolism would trump Obama’s complete absence of foreign-policy experience.

Many apparently shared Obama’s view that disagreements abroad were not so much over substantive issues as they were caused by race, class, or gender fissures, or were the fallout from the prior insensitivity of Europe and the United States — as evidenced by a Nobel Prize awarded to Obama on the basis of his stated good intentions.

Third, Obama had a clever recipe for concocting a new disengagement. He would mesh the increasing American weariness with intervention abroad and fears over a shaky economy with his own worldview about the dubious past role of the United States. The result might be that both libertarians and liberals, for differing reasons, would agree that we should stay out of problems abroad, that a struggling lower class and middle class would agree that money spent overseas was money that could be better spent at home, and that critiques of America’s past would seem not so much effusions of  leftist ideology as practical reasons why the United States should disengage abroad.

Finally, to the degree that any problems still persisted, Obama could either contextualize them (given his legal training and community-organizing experience), or talk loudly and threaten. For example, by referencing past American sins, by an occasional ceremonial bow or apology, by a bit of psychoanalysis about “macho shtick” or the schoolboy Putin cutting up in the back of the room, an exalted Obama would show the world that he understood anti-social behavior and could ameliorate it as a counselor does with his emotional client. The world in turn would appreciate his patience and understanding with lesser folk, and react accordingly. Again, in place of policy would be the towering personality of Barack Obama. And if all that did not work, a peeved Obama could issue deadlines, red lines, and step-over lines to aggressors — and reissue them when they were ignored.

Note what was not so integral to the Obama foreign policy. There was little sense of history and geography that might explain why crises transcend personalities. There was scant awareness that sometimes states act selfishly and immaturely. And just as individuals do, nations can interpret magnanimity as weakness to be exploited rather than as beneficence to be appreciated.
There was little appreciation of the postwar system created by the United States over the last 70 years, which had created vast global wealth and security, primarily because of the unique role of the United States in suppressing local and regional challenges to the international order. Obama had little apparent awareness that the U.S. picked friends and enemies not on the shallow basis that the former were wholly good and the latter abjectly evil, but rather on the basis that in an imperfect world some nations shared some of our ideas about politics, the market, and the need for an international system, and others did not, to the point of using violence.

And so we got “reset” with Russia, following on the idea that Bush had unduly alienated Putin, that Putin would appreciate that Obama marked a new frontier in the American presidency, and that Russia could see Obama was empathizing with Putin’s post–Cold War dilemmas. Who cared that reset, in fact, was negating a reasonable response to Putin’s aggression in Georgia, or that Russian territorial aims historically transcended ideology, or that Russia had not always played a positive role in the postwar order?

In the Middle East, Obama felt that reach-outs and Cairo-style oratory would assure the Islamic world that he would never intervene in its affairs. Obama supposedly understood historic Middle East grievances, and his own personal story was proof of that insight. Again, Obama did not so much reject prior American policy as not really understand it in the first place: appreciation of Israel’s unique democracy and pro-American sentiment, assurance that Iran must not go nuclear, advocacy for gradual liberalization to avoid the false choices between dictatorship and Islamism, resistance to new Chinese and old Russian expansionism in the Middle East, and protection of the sometimes odious but nonetheless stable Persian Gulf sheikhdoms that so much of the world depended upon to export oil.

The Middle East is now in chaos after the Cairo-like speeches, the pressures on Israel, the red lines in Syria, the on-again, off-again sanctions on Iran, the lead-from-behind bombing of Libya and subsequent Benghazi chaos, the flipping and flopping over Egypt, and the alienation of the monarchical Persian Gulf allies. The one constant is not so much doubt about American intent as it is agreement that the U.S. does not know what it is doing, and that there is not much reason to care even if it did know what it was doing.

Obama seemed likewise ignorant of our postwar position in the Pacific, namely that successful nations like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, and perhaps the Philippines depended on ironclad guarantees of security so that they did not need to go nuclear in order to protect themselves again historical Chinese and Russian expansionism, or North Korean nuclear lunacy.
Obama failed to grasp that our Pacific allies were very much interested in continuity with past American policy and little interested if at all in Obama’s iconic status, his rhetorical sermonizing, or his half-baked tutorials about past American lapses. They did not wish to hear that Obama understood China’s dilemma about translating economic power into military influence or squaring the circle of capitalism and Communist autocracy. They only wanted to be reassured that China would not disrupt the landscape of the last 60 years, in which they had reached a level of freedom and affluence unrivaled in their histories.

In a word, Barack Obama did not understand that the world’s challenges preceded George W. Bush and would outlive Barack Obama, much less that he was a steward charged with preserving the U.S.-inspired postwar stability. He failed to see that much of the anger with Bush had been over Iraq between 2004 and 2008. To the degree the U.S. was unpopular, this resulted largely from entrenched critics abroad amplifying American domestic opposition to the Iraq War and to the so-called war on terror. Yet by 2009, the Iraq War was largely over and won, and the war on terror had largely established protocols to prevent another 9/11-scale attack. In most other regards, Bush had simply carried on a bipartisan foreign policy not much different from that of Bill Clinton, Bush’s father, or Ronald Reagan.

Obama did not grasp that being against Bush meant for the most part opposing that bipartisan foreign policy of the previous 30 years — with regard to Venezuela and Cuba, to the Middle East, and to Russia, China, and India. Such knee-jerk opposition inevitably caused embarrassment when Obama was forced to quietly accept or even expand Bush’s war on terror, and to assure Asia and Europe that things were still as they had been before he took office. Sometime in late 2013 Barack Obama seemed to sense that his foreign policy had failed, and that in almost every area of the globe things were more dangerous than when he entered office — and scarier because of his own initiatives.

And what now? Blaming Bush had a shelf life of four years, proved nihilistic, and can’t be continued for the next three. No one abroad cares that Obama is either leftwing or the first African-American president or that he speaks well from a teleprompter. Hope and change have become a sort of embarrassment. Another Cairo speech would earn guffaws. More loud reaching out to Turkey, Cuba, and Venezuela would earn eye-rolling. China has heard it all before. Iran is calibrating how to time its nuclear acquisition with the ending of Obama’s second term. Israel is politely tuning out. Putin is wondering: Can all these gifts be for real, or might there still be some elaborate ruse?

But mostly, our enemies now are ready to test us, and our friends will soon consider distancing themselves from us. So much so that even Obama’s occasional wise initiatives, like a trade deal with Japan, will go nowhere, given that there is no upside in supporting America, and no downside in opposing it.
We had a bad foreign policy and now we have no foreign policy — and sadly, we can only hope that is an improvement.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

1e)

Email Shows Adviser Urged Rice to Blame Video for Benghazi Attack

By Melanie Batley

An email obtained by the government watchdog Judicial Watch shows that a senior White House official advised then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice to blame a spontaneous protest from a YouTube video for the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Fox News reported. 

Fox's chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reported that the Sept. 14, 2012, email shows that White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes advised Rice to focus on a YouTube video as the cause of a spontaneous protest, though transcripts have since been revealed to show that senior defense officials had informed the administration on the night of the event that the assault was a terrorist attack. 

Rhodes outlined a number of talking points for Rice, with the advice "to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy."

"Now we know the Obama White House's chief concern about the Benghazi attack was making sure that President Obama looked good," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton  said in a statement. 

"And these documents undermine the Obama administration's narrative that it thought the Benghazi attack had something to do with protests or an Internet video. Given the explosive material in these documents, it is no surprise that we had to go to federal court to pry them loose from the Obama State Department," he added, referring to the organization having obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Among the top administration personnel who received the Rhodes memo were White House Press Secretary Jay Carney; Deputy Press Secretary Joshua Earnest; then-White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer; then-White House Deputy Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri; then-National Security Council Director of Communications Erin Pelton; Special Assistant to the Press Secretary Howli Ledbetter; and then-White House Senior Adviser and political strategist David Plouffe.

The Rhodes communications strategy email also instructs recipients to portray Obama as "steady and statesmanlike" throughout the crisis. Rhodes also says in the message that one of the goals is to "reinforce the president and administration's strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges." 
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