One thing I haven't heard though is Obama apologizing for America, or America's role in the world. This has become the default charge of Obama's foreign policy critics that he is running around the world "apologizing" for America.
Frankly, that's utter nonsense (I'd prefer to use another word, but I try to keep my posts PG). Obama has been stressing the need for America to do crazy things like actually listen to and respect other nations - a break from the Bushite/Neoconservative unilateral foreign policy of "shut up and do what your told."
But to the neocons, this equals both apology and surrender, making Obama the Neville Chamberlain of our time. Case in point: this anti-Obama screed published by Nile Gardiner on Tuesday. Nile is the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation.
I don't care if Gardiner, the Heritage Foundation and London's Telegraph newspaper want to slam Pres. Obama, they just shouldn't offer up such intellectually lazy arguments as the one Nile puts forward (really, if you have a title like Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom you should be able to put together a decent argument). Just three paragraphs into his screed, Nile says this: "the Obama doctrine is now lying in tatters after North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-Il and Iranian demagogue Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met Obama’s recent overtures with missile tests and even a nuclear blast from Pyongyang." The implication being that this wouldn't have happened on George Dubya's watch.
But, in fact, it did. North Korea's first nuclear test happened in 2006, six years into the reign of Bush II; Iran's ballistic missile program also progressed by leaps and bounds during the Bush regime, so has (if we believe the most dire estimates) Iran's nuclear program.
These regimes weren't slowed by the Bush's unilateral foreign policy - it could be argued (successfully I think) that the belligerent tone and lack of diplomatic engagement actually encouraged their weapons programs, making the world not more safe, but less. Just as Bush's policy of "my way or the highway" damaged our relations with wide swaths of the globe: Latin America, Russia and Western Europe especially. Gardiner and the rest of the 'apology' critics ignore these facts, shouting that the tough Bush/Neocon foreign policy enhanced America's position in the world, when in reality it did the opposite.
There's certainly room to criticize Obama's foreign policy, but that criticism needs to be more than some lame charges that he's an apologist.
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