Apparent License to Challenge The United States

It was Vice President Biden who was prescient when he said that during the first six months of the Obama Administration that America’s enemies would challenge the new President because of his lack of foreign policy experience. I am not one of those conservatives who will fault our new president for such a dearth of experience because Bush, Clinton, Carter, and Ronald Reagan also lacked foreign policy experience. Instead, I take issue with the naïveté of President Obama in his dealings with these rogue states. Unlike the Europeans who are taken in by our president speeches, our usual despots are not moved. It seems that since President Obama took office, America’s enemies are having a field day taking license to challenge us in matters of our interests. Even in matters not wholly in the foreign policy realm, for example, the Somali pirate situation, the Obama Administration seemed hesitant, notwithstanding the eventual positive outcome--of more import are The North Koreans, the Iranians, and Hugo Chavez. To be fair, none of the recent administrations seem to know how to deal with the North Koreans-the Clinton and recent Bush Administrations failed miserably to deal with our Napoleonic Complex despot. The only solution is to cut off necessities to the North by asking the Chinese to intercede on our behalf-not that I expect the Chinese to do anything to help without prodding. We have the prod by letting the Chinese know that if they do not reign in their proxy, then we would have to spread the nuclear genie in that area of the world, a scenario the Chinese are adamantly against. This would mean arming South Korea, Japan, and Singapore; I do not know how effective this would be in light of the fact that the Chinese owns most of our debt. As for the Iranians, we have been given an opening with the recent uprising among the Iranian young for Democracy-this will not be an easy task, but overthrowing the Mullahs can be had. As a boy, I read in Time magazine how Pope John Paul and President Reagan, assisted with faxes, helped bring down the Soviet Union by supporting Les Walesa in Poland—we have heard how the advent of similar technologies (Facebook and Twitter) helped the students in Iran. We must foster these advents to support and hopefully get the same outcome like Reagan and the Pope had in Poland and eventually the crumbling of the then Soviet Union. I do not worry much about Hugo Chavez, but perhaps I should. It may be prudent to bribe neighboring friendly countries or call it what you may and place troops in these neighboring countries as a check to Chavez’s aims. Moreover, because of Venezuela’s proximity, it should be rather easy to be privy to Intelligence and being able to place assets which would assist us if there are any dire threats coming from Hugo. In addition, economically we could drill and lessen our dependence on oil imported from Chavez, but with the Democratic Party, on this particular issue, they value animals than the blood spill in wars to secure the black gold. It is a given that good will among the races cannot be legislated nor can peace be had by good intention speeches emanating from the presidential bully pulpit….

-Verily Prime