Caroline Glick
THE JERUSALEM POST
Jun. 15, 2009
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech Sunday evening at Bar-Ilan
University had one goal: To get US President Barack Obama off of Israel's
back.
Netanyahu's speech was an eloquent, rational and at times impassioned
defense of Israel. For Israeli ears, after years of former prime minister
Ehud Olmert's and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni's continuous assaults
on Israeli rights, and their strident defenses of capitulation to the
Palestinians and the Syrians, Netanyahu's address was a breath of fresh air.
But it is hard to see how it could have possibly had any lasting impact on
Obama or his advisers.
To be moved by rational argument, a person has to be open to rational
discourse. And what we have witnessed over the past week with the Obama
administration's reactions to both North Korea's nuclear brinksmanship and
Iran's sham elections is that its foreign policy is not informed by
rationality but by the president's morally relative, post-modern ideology.
In this anti-intellectual and anti-rational climate, Netanyahu's speech has
little chance of making a lasting impact on the White House.
If rational thought was the basis for the administration's policymaking on
foreign affairs, North Korea's decisions to test long range ballistic
missiles and nuclear weapons, send two US citizens to long prison terms and
then threaten nuclear war should have made the administration reconsider its
current policy of seeking the approval and assistance of North Korea's
primary enabler - China - for any action it takes against Pyongyang. As
Nicholas Eberstadt suggested in Friday's Wall Street Journal, rather than
spending its time passing UN Security Council resolutions with no
enforcement mechanisms against North Korea, the administration would be
working with a coalition of the willing to adopt measures aimed at lowering
the threat North Korea constitutes to regional, US and global security
through its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and its proliferation
activities.
But the administration has done no such thing. Instead of working with and
strengthening its allies, it has opted to work with North Korea's allies
China and Russia to forge a Security Council resolution harsh enough to
convince North Korean leader Kim Jung Il to threaten nuclear war, but too
weak to degrade his capacity to wage one.
For full article click here
No comments:
Post a Comment