No More

In a typically perceptive essay on the Obama administration's disastrous foreign policy and its impact on the structure of middle eastern and Asian countries, Richard Fernandez first quotes Henry Kissinger, and then comments:

[Kissenger said:] “it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal”.  [Under the Obama administration] everything was subordinated to domestic politics according to which Washington’s first instinct was to coerce its allies and attract its foes. In contrast to the Marine’s well known slogan, the motto of some diplomats was “no worse friend, no better enemy”.

Fernandez then goes on to discuss how artificial borders created by Western diplomats over a century ago are now dissolving. How countries like Iraq and Syria, among others, are gone forever, and a new order is emerging—an order that is inherently inimical to the United States. Most important, how the Obama administration has alienated past allies (e.g., Egypt, Israel) and tried (unsuccessfully) to cozy up to foes (e.g., Iran).

But then Fernandez focuses closer to home. He writes:

One of the new countries which a few trendy people in Western capitals have been trying to synthetically create for a long time is ‘non-America’, or more generally, the non-West. They’ve been working furiously to erase its borders and replace it with as much of a void as they can possibly create. Like all the other collapsing diplomatic projects mentioned by [Israeli Defense Minister Moshe] Ya’alon, a small intellectual elite thinks it can take an object of millions of people which has existed for centuries and remold it to their own liking.

Fundamentally change America, just like that. Why should it be different from ordering a pizza, only bigger, which they’ve been doing all their lives? Their view of the world is so insular, so limited by their narrow viewing slit that they don’t even realize they live in the same physical country as the one the want to destroy. Just as fat men grow bellies so large they can’t see their feet, some narcissists have an ego so bloated they don’t even know where their food and safety comes from.

Bill Ayers triumphantly told Oregon University students that America’s ‘Game Is Over’ and ‘Another World’ Is Coming. “I don’t think there’s any question, and I don’t think any of you would question, that the American Empire is in decline–that economically, and politically, and in some ways culturally, that we are in decline”.

After decades of paying up, shutting down, not resisting, and self-hating, he says, ‘oh, it worked’. It’s his “mission accomplished” moment. He has studiously noted America’s precipitous fall but what to others may seem Obama’s mistakes are to him a fulfillment of a long cherished dream.

But as Ya’alon observed with respect to the Middle East, one must beware of such dreams. The ordinary lives of millions have a momentum that clever people like Ayers often fail to understand. They go on in ways that confound the sophisticated. The simple create, sometimes faster than even the most sophisticated men can destroy. Perhaps it will be Ayers’ imagined future that will dissolve in the tides of history. Maybe it is he and his buddies whose time over.

You can shaft some of your friends all of the time. You can even shaft all of your friends some of the time. But you can’t betray everyone all of the time on the altar of political expedience. People start to notice those things and start to object. Implicit in Henry Kissinger’s remark about the betrayal of friends is that the one exception to a policy of betrayal had to be yourself. You are, if you are sane, your own friend. You cannot be fatal to yourself. I wonder if Ayers and company ever thought that far. Nah.

"Nah," indeed. It is not within their intellectual and psychological ability to look at past history, to see the long line of failures that their approach to governance has created, to understand the human toll that left-wing governance precipitates—the debt, the lack of individual initiative, the lack of good jobs, the corruption, the poverty, the shortages, the intrusiveness of government—and ask whether their approach is fatally flawed.

At the risk of long distance psychoanalysis, Barack Obama and his Team of 2s have adopted an ideology that posits that America's flaws far outweigh anything good about our homeland. Barack Obama and the Team of 2s are perfectly comfortable with tearing down what they perceive as a corrupt capitalist system and replacing it with ... what exactly? Obamacare? Leading from behind? A statist system where all power is derived from B.I.G.? Government agencies that have been weaponized to attack citizens who think differently? A state controlled media?

One can only hope that at some point a critical mass of Americans will recognize that the changes that Obama and those that follow him want to make are fatal to our country. If and when that happens, the Team of 2s will be no more. Maybe that will begin with state and local elections tomorrow.