David P. Goldman has been ruminating on U.S. foreign policy, first at Asia Times Online and now at PJ Media, for a while. The latest target of his incisive criticism has been President Obama’s response to Russia’s seizure of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. He makes several worthwhile points in his recent post “The Winner in Ukraine is China.”
American policy–Administration as well as opposition–isn’t even wrong, as I have been warning for weeks. It is simply irrelevant. We aren’t looking at the whole chessboard. The German media signaled in March that sanctions against Russia will drive Moscow and Beijing closer together, and that is precisely what has happened. We indulged in a frenzy of impotent, self-consoling posturing against the nasty aggressive Russians, and succeeded only in toppling a pillar of Cold War diplomacy [emphasis added]. We set out to propagate democracy in Eastern Europe, and helped to push Putin’s popularity rating at home above 80%. In the entire sorry history of US diplomacy, I can think of nothing that more resembles an own goal. Nice going, guys. Putin isn’t a genius. We are complete idiots.
Four decades after President Richard Nixon’s famed opening to Red China in February 1972, Goldman has used the specter of Russo-Sino cooperation to accuse President Obama of more than gross incompetence. He has made a revealing comparison between Obama and Nixon. During his tenure (1969-1974), Nixon and his National Security Advisor (and eventually Secretary of State), Henry Kissinger, faced a challenging international landscape with far more skill than Obama has shown.
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