The American Spectator

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Why?

Barack Obama was not born yesterday ex nihilo, without intellectual or political predecessors. He is scion, part and parcel of the left wing  of the American left and identifies with its view of America at home and internationally. His theoretical foundation in foreign affairs is William Appleman Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, the point of which is that the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro were on history's correct side while the American people should be dragged there. His practical templates are Anthony Lake, who wrote Carter's celebration of American guilt and defeat in Vietnam, and Morton Halperin, who wrote that the whole world had a stake in defeating America because had the American people prevailed in Vietnam they likely would have started a nuclear war. That iswhy Obama, like the people with whom he spent his formative years, whose language he speaks, whose assumptions he shares, has been concerned not with making the world safe for America, but with making America safe for the world.

That is why Obama apologizes for America to its enemies and favors them over its friends: because
he shares their and his domestic friends' sense that the rest of us have much to apologize for, that we need to be changed, reformed, restricted. That is why he speaks as he does: because he believes that
by pretending to foreigners that America is just like he and his friends are, that it shares their loves and hates, he can persuade them to be nice, at least to him. That is why he is incapable of understanding war -- at least against non-American enemies.

Our problems in dealing with the rest of the world, however, are far bigger than one man or one party. They even transcend the rise of an influential class of people who value America for what they might make of it but disdain it for what it is. Rather, our problems lie in the broad-based loss of a culture of seriousness in international affairs. All of us will have to pay for that.