"America the Weak" is the title of Ralph Peters' latest column in the New York Post. It's a scary and prescient look at the national security challenges we could face under an Obama administration. As he writes:
If Sen. Barack Obama is elected president, our re public will survive, but our international strategy and some of our allies may not. His first year in office would conjure globe-spanning challenges as our enemies piled on to exploit his weakness.
Add in Sen. Joe Biden - with his track record of calling every major foreign-policy crisis wrong for 35 years - as vice president and de facto secretary of State, and we'd face a formula for strategic disaster.
Peters goes on to list a dozen potential confrontations, from North Korea to the Middle East. And, if that's not enough, take a look at members of Obama's prospective cabinet; it's long on Democratic party hacks (John Kerry); Republican malcontents (hellooo, Chuck Hagel) and foreign policy holdovers from the Carter and Clinton years.
We'll take Peters' theory a step further and predict that Obama's first national security tests will occur early in his administration--within 90 days of inauguration--and come from North Korea and Iran. Look for Pyongyang to suspend the current nuclear deal in early 2009, about the time Tehran stages a new showdown in the Persian Gulf.
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If you have any doubts about Obama being tested, just ask his running mate. Speaking at two Seattle-area fundraisers on Sunday, Senator Joe Biden "guaranteed" that Obama will be tested by an international crisis during his first six months in office. As ABC News reports:
"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."
"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."
Thanks for the campaign ad, Joe. For once, he's right.
It makes you wonder, what sort of campaign strategy Biden is employing when he tells us that a vote for his ticket virtually insures a major international crisis immediately upon their assuming office!
ReplyDeleteIf my mind were not already made up (and it was with regard to party about thirty five years ago), I would certainly be swayed to vote for a ticket which offered significantly higher probability of stability.
Joe Biden: the campaign gift that keeps on giving. Reading the transcript of his comments, it looks like he was trying to say that Bush has made a hash of the world scene, and the Dims are going to make some tought choices to straighten out the situation.
ReplyDeleteBut, in his typical Gafe-o-Matic style, Biden couldn't stitch his talking points together in a coherent fashion. So, he would up telling the truth about his party and its nominee, just as he did when he said it was "patriotic" to pay higher taxes.
More disturbing--as I observe in the post--this unprepared Commander-in-Chief will be surrounded by the national security geniuses of the Carter and Clinton Administration. Despite that, Ralph Peters believes that America can survive an Obama Administration. I'd call him an optimist.