Reasons of Culture

The American President?
William Katz
Political Mavens.com

Read the rest after the jump

What is the problem here? The problem is that the foreign policy of the United states, under Barack Hussein Obama Jr., can be summarized as follows: Punish our friends, reward our enemies. We have seen this now for more than a year, and the resulting gain for the United States is: nothing.

It would be bad enough if this policy were simply the result of the latest realpolitik theory. This is not the first era, after all, in which being a friend of the United States has had its dangers. In 1956, President Eisenhower, of all people, turned on Britain, France and Israel for their attempt to secure the Suez Canal in Egypt. (He later expressed some regret over his action.) And Jimmy Carter did not inspire confidence among our West European allies.But there is a difference between those episodes, and others like them, and today. Some administrations have occasionally distanced themselves from traditional allies for reasons, often misguided, of policy.

The Obama administration is distancing itself from American allies for reasons of culture. This president barely tolerates his own country. He has little use for its allies, many of which share Western values and ideals. The president, despite his denials, is a man of the Third World. He sees countries like Britain as colonialists, even though the colonial era ended many decades ago.

While he is not a Muslim by religion, Obama is a man with a Muslim cultural background, giving him an affinity for nations that have traditionally been hostile to the United States. His speech last year in Cairo contained more groveling than Neville Chamberlain's remarks at Munich.

More on the Dissing of Our Cousins

In an opinion piece published in the New York Post, Arthur Herman, whose latest book is “Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age.” points to several examples of Obama apparently seeking to downplay the traditionally close U.S.-Britain ties:

• Obama did not hold a joint Rose Garden press conference with Brown, the “usual protocol” when a president and British prime minister first meet.
• Instead of citing the decades-old “special relationship” between the two countries, a White House spokesperson referred to a “special partnership.”
• In the traditional gift exchange between the two leaders, Brown gave Obama a pen holder made from the timber of the first British ship to fight the slave trade, and a signed first edition of the classic 8-volume biography of Winston Churchill by Randolph Churchill and Sir Martin Gilbert.

Obama’s gift to Brown was a collection of DVDs of classic American films, including “Psycho,” which are all available in British stores.
But Obama had earlier demonstrated his disdain for Churchill, ordering that the bust of Churchill that Prime Minister Tony Blair had presented to the U.S. after 9/11 be returned to the British Embassy.

In fact, another Churchill expert, “Churchill: Speaker of the Century” author James Humes, cited a report that when Obama first entered the Oval Office and saw the Churchill bust, he said, “Get that goddam thing out of here.”

Herman wrote in the Post: “This was a stunning posthumous attack on the memory of a man who was not only the living embodiment of the Anglo-American special relationship (Churchill was half American), but of its ideological foundations.”

That special relationship has seen American and British forces fight together in two World Wars, Korea, the first Gulf War, Bosnia and most recently in Iraq. But the eight volumes of Churchill’s biography “will plainly sit unread on the White House bookshelf — because Barack Obama clearly considers that legacy, like the Anglo-American alliance itself, to be outdated,” Herman observed.

The London Daily Telegraph succinctly stated: “Obama has been rudeness personified toward Britain.”