Where’s Waldo?

For years now, the left has charged that the United States is too aggressive in its foreign policy, all across the globe: e.g. they believe that our support of Israel has perpetuated the suffering, not only of the Palestinians, but of the peoples of the Middle East as a whole; that our support of former Soviet Bloc countries in Eastern Europe is unnecessarily provoking our old adversary, Russia; that multilateral solutions (i.e. the UN) are the best way solve a number of international crises, from North Korea to Iran. They are now hopeful that, with cooler heads in charge (read: the cowboy is gone), we will finally pull back from the world and be more ‘tolerant’ and able to ‘listen’ to the so-called legitimate concerns of our enemies. They further believe that a world with diminished U.S. influence will actually be more stable and peaceful than one in which we are full engaged.

However, they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of (or are desperately trying to re-write) history: Namely, that it was in fact our ‘arrogant’ engagement that has resulted in a stable, war-free, and largely democratic Europe and Asia for more than 50 years. More importantly though, looking toward the future, they seem to have no understanding of a very important maxim first stated by Aristotle: Nature abhors a vacuum. This maxim is true not only in the physical world, but also in the geopolitical: when one power diminishes in influence, by definition, another must and will take its place, because a vacuum, by its nature, desires to be filled.

So what does our teleprompter-in-chief do? First he goes to Europe, for the G20 meeting, and apologizes for our ‘arrogance’, thus supporting the claims by the left that that is in fact what we have been and what we are. While there, as has been noted on this blog and elsewhere, he finds it appropriate to subjugate himself, and by proxy the whole of the U.S., to the royalty of an unelected kingdom. Now he has diminished the status of the U.S. one step further, by placing himself in a non-descript position in a photo of all of the leaders of the Americas at the Americas summit (see below). Referring to my title, “Where’s Waldo?”, see if you can find Obama in the picture within 60 seconds….ready, go!... 

...Yeah, me neither. 

Obama is supposed to be the leader of the free world. He is supposed to stand up for the oppressed in our hemisphere and show them a way forward, to prosperity and happiness. Instead what we get, in this picture-worth -a-thousand-words moment, is a man who chooses not to lead, who instead stands back to let others take his place. Whom does he allow, instead, to show the way forward?...Bolivia’s Evo Morales, who believes that Zimbabwe-style expropriation is the way forward, and Brazil’s Lula, who last week blamed “white people with blue eyes” for the financial crisis, each took center stage. Nature abhors a vacuum; and unfortunately for our long-term security, and for the futures of millions in Central and South America, the vacuum that Obama is creating will be eagerly filled by those who have their own visions of what the future of the Americas should look like.