ADIZ

As our shrinking pool of Middle East allies contemplates the Obama administration's "deal" with Iran, they must wonder how Barack Obama entered into secret negotiations with Iran more than a year ago and came out the other side last weekend with Iran's central position unchanged. Iran gave us nothing, and Obama -- well, he's a strong proponent of diplomacy, isn't he, yet his secretary of state failed to get even minor concessions from the world's primary sponsor of Islamist terror and absolutely nothing to change their thuggish behavior.

I think Barack Obama fails to realize that negotiation should be win-win. With his domestic opponets, it's been win-lose, with his side winning. With the Iran "deal," it's also been win-lose, but it's the United States and our Middle East allies that have lost. A year ago, Iran insisted that it must keep all 19,000 centrifuges and maintain its right to enrich uranium. This weekend it got all of that and depending on estimates, between 7 and 20 billion dollars to boot. Wow, John Kerry and his president are really, really tough negotiators.

But something else is happening on the other side of the world. The International Business Times reports:

Effective this [past] weekend, China’s government declared an Air Defense Identification Zone that includes a significant part of disputed areas in the East China Sea. As the U.S. and Japanese governments express concern over Chinese posturing in the hotly disputed area, Chinese netizens are applauding the move.

In an official statement regarding the ADIZ, established on Saturday at 10 a.m., China’s Ministry of National Defense announced that flight plans and other identifying information would be required for all aircraft operating in that zone. “If an aircraft doesn’t supply its flight plan, China’s armed forces will adopt emergency defensive measures in response,” the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. “The announcement states that China’s Ministry of National Defense has full administrative rights over the zone.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel released an official statement on the ADIZ, expressing deep concern. “We view this development as a destabilizing attempt to alter the status quo in the region,” he said, adding that the unilateral decision by China “increases the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculations” in the region. Hagel also affirmed that the U.S. remains aligned with its allies in the region, specifically Japan. The territorial dispute involves mainly the cluster of islands referred to by Japan as the Senkaku and by China as the Diaoyu. Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said “one-sided action” will potentially “trigger unpredictable events” and “cannot be allowed.”

China has watched Barack Obama's feckless foreign policy for almost five years and has concluded, correctly, I think, that this president is weak, indecisive, and unable to act in a coherent way. The perception precipitated the ADIZ—a clear thumb in the eye for US allies Japan, South Korea, and Australia.

But back to Iran. Applauded by his trained media hamsters and those on the Left, Obama has is now again being touted as a legitimate candidate for the Nobel Peace Price. Here's the Huffington Post:

Finally, Barack Obama may prove deserving of his Nobel Peace Prize by joining with England, France, China, Russia and Germany in negotiating an eminently sensible rapprochement with Iran on its nuclear program. Following on his pullback from war with Syria and instead, successfully negotiating the destruction of that country's supply of chemical weapons, this is another bold step to fulfill the peacemaking promise that got him elected president in the first place.

Deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, huh? I wonder what the moderate citizens of Egypt, or Libya, or Syria might say about that. "Peacemaking promise"? Ask the US troops wounded and killed in Afghanistan and now scheduled to support that Islamist regime until 2024. Obama is a peace maker only in the fevered imagination of the Left.

It's funny ... in a speech yesterday, Barack Obama castigated those who criticized his Iran "deal" suggesting that they were warmongers. And yet, when China established the ADIZ, someone with some sense (while Obama was fund-raising in Beverly Hills) decided that the best way to send the hard men in China a message was to fly a squadron of B-52s through the ADIZ. So much for diplomacy.

Diplomacy only works when each side perceives a steely seriousness in the other. It works only when each side backs up its words with deeds, and if necessary, suggestions of serious consequences. If one side perceives weakness, diplomacy is doomed. But no worries, if you read Obama's trained hamsters, Iran (and China) perceive strength. Seriously?