Even when Obama does refer to America’s essential goodness, as he did in his 2010 State of the Union address, it is only to advance his commitment to socialist internationalism and redistribution of American wealth: he wields Americans’ empathy and compassion like a club to manipulate us into funding bad foreign policy and despotic regimes.
In a seminal moment for modern historians and active political observers like myself, a snapshot came across the newswires, showing presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama crossing an airplane tarmac, mid-gait, and holding Fareed Zakaria’s American epitaph, The Post-American World. In the photo, Obama is holding his place in the book with his finger, as if he didn’t dare put it down and wanted to dive back into it as soon as he could.
Zakaria describes his book this way: “This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” In it, he details the era he hopes we are entering now—a world in which the United States would “no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures.” He asserts that the “rise of the rest” is the “great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.”7
It was at the moment that photo went out over the wires, back in May 2008, that I began calling him “post-American Obama” and, subsequent to the election, the “post-American president.” The book predicting America’s inevitable decline turned out to be a veritable blueprint for Obama’s presidency. Obama seems determined to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obama went to work from his first day in office to make Zakaria’s wishful thinking about America’s decline become a reality. As the most powerful man in the world, he would level the playing field, even if it meant cutting America off at the knees. Good and evil would be made equivalent, with evil sanctioned by the world’s only remaining superpower: democracy and tyranny, dictator and elected leader would be given the same moral sanction.
Obama has been working fast. He was elected president by a wide margin. If he had governed as a left-of-center president in the mold of Bill Clinton, he would have been certain of reelection. Most observers saw him as another Democrat politician in this mode. Cheney remarked: “I saw him when he got elected as a liberal Democrat, but conventional in the sense of sort of falling within the parameters of the national Democratic Party. I think he’s demonstrated pretty conclusively now during his first year in office that he’s more radical than that, that he’s farther outside the parameters if you will of what we’ve traditionally had in Democratic presidents in years past.”8
He could have in due time repaid the many favors he owed to his various special interest constituencies—including trial lawyers, labor unions, banks, and insurance companies—and governed as a successful president, boosting our country’s stature worldwide, and waving the flag proudly. This doesn’t mean he couldn’t have found success implementing his plan to change the nation radically—but everyone expected that he would go about it slowly, careful not to alienate any of his supporters or cause undue alarm among his opponents.
Instead, he traveled around the world and denigrated American achievements and American uniqueness. He reached out in friendship to our enemies and the enemies of freedom and individual rights, including Hugo Chávez and even Fidel Castro, and offered Russia a significant boost on its way to returning to superpower status by selling out Eastern Europe. He catered to—and fawned shamelessly over—Islam and Muslim countries, making preposterous statements about how much the United States owes Islam, and even about how America was a Muslim country.9
Obama clearly believed that doing all this would bolster his image in other countries. But he was taking a calculated risk: that his apparent lack of concern for American national security, and for America’s historical achievements and place in the world, would backfire and anger Americans. Nonetheless, he took the risk. He must have believed that he was powerful enough and popular enough to neutralize any domestic political backlash that may result—and he certainly had the mainstream media on his side, as he did during his presidential campaign, to cover for him, make excuses for him when he failed, and obscure the full scope of what he was doing.
Barack Hussein Obama had chosen the path of the post-American presidency. He seemed to envision himself as more than just the president of the United States, but as a shaper of the new world order, an internationalist energetically laying the groundwork for global government: the president of the world.
The problem for Americans was that in his quest for internationalism and global socialism, Obama was leaving the United States twisting in the wind. He was treating America as a stepping-stone to help get him where he wanted to go, and he seemed willing to do anything to destroy America’s prestige in the world.
Domestically he is just as destructive. Americans worry about the extraordinary national debt that he has helped increase exponentially, and which is leading us to economic ruin. Obama doesn’t seem concerned about this at all: his plans include a $200 billion second stimulus program and various socialist programs that will further drain the nation’s resources, including nationalized health care and the cap-and-trade plan.
One common thread running through all of Obama’s Orwellian-sounding proposals to “remake America” is that they all give much greater power to the government.
The difficulty in writing this book was keeping up with the speed at which Obama set about radically transforming both the global and the national landscape in favor of our enemies. In this book we have sketched out how he has set out to do this in the first year of his presidency. He sought to gain control of health care (20 percent of the American economy), energy, and education. His foreign policy is breathtaking in its betrayal of the rational self-interest of all Americans. In working to bring socialism and internationalism to America, appeasing Iran, betraying Israel, and infringing upon our freedoms, Obama is setting America on the path to ruin.
We have mapped out how he has begun here. Nothing is more certain than that he will continue on the same course.
The Shining City on a Hill has gone dark. The United States has entered the age of the post-American presidency.
And Barack Hussein Obama is the first post-American president.
THE POST-AMERICAN PRESIDENCY
ONE
OBAMA AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.…
—Barack Obama1
BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA ABDICATED. HE ABDICATED THAT WHICH WAS NOT HIS TO ABDICATE.
In his first months as president he showed himself ready to give up American sovereignty for the primacy of international law; regulations on climate change, gun control, and free speech (including speech on the Internet); and the replacement of the dollar as the basic international currency.
During his campaign, Obama declared his affinity for international law. “Since the founding of our nation, the United States has championed international law because we benefit from it. Promoting—and respecting—clear rules that are consistent with our values allows us to hold all nations to a high standard of behavior, and to mobilize friends and allies against those nations that break the rules. Promoting strong international norms helps us advance many interests, including nonproliferation, free and fair trade, a clean environment, and protecting our troops in wartime. Respect for international legal norms also plays a vital role in fighting terrorism. Because the administration cast aside international norms that reflect American values, such as the Geneva Conventions, we are less able to promote those values abroad.”2
It sounded great—until it became clear that promoting international norms meant compromising American sovereignty. Ambassador John Bolton warned in his book Surrender Is Not an Option of the dangers of what is known as “norming.”
Norming, Bolton explained in an interview, “is a term that’s applied to international agreements that affect the behavior of individual governments.” When leftist activists fail in pushing their domestic agendas, “such as on gun issues in Congress or state legislatures, they stop fighting there and try and take the issue internationally.”3
“This approach,” Bolton explained, “often called ‘norming,’ meaning, in a neutral sense, creating international norms of behavior, could be helpful, especially if it meant raising standards in intolerable regimes. What it increasingly came to mean, however, was whipping the United States into line with leftist views of the way the world should look.”4
What would be the good of subjecting America to international norms? America has always been a light to the world.
It is essential that we understand the importance and singular greatness of America, and not give in to internationalist gobbledygook that amounts to nothing more than transnational serfdom.
In May 2009, the United States joined the notorious cabal of evildoers, the United Nations Human Rights Council—which the Bush administration had boycotted for its relentless defamation and demonization of Israel and refusal to condemn human-rights violations in Islamic countries, notably Sudan. Ironically, the United States would sit on the council with four notorious human-rights violators: China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.5 In December 2009 the watchdog group UN Watch issued a report showing that the Human Rights Council had effectively become an enabler for human-rights violators, rather than a genuine defender of human rights. Hillel Neuer, UN Watch’s executive director, remarked: “Paradoxically, as our report today shows, the U.N.’s main human rights body has turned into the world’s leading sponsor of impunity for gross human rights abuses worldwide. It’s a case of the foxes guarding the chickens, with countries like China, Russia, Pakistan, Cuba and Saudi Arabia shielding each other’s abuses. Democracies should send a signal by opposing the council’s resolutions, even if they will be outvoted.”
That was something Barack Obama was extremely unlikely to do.
Then on September 24, 2009, Obama became the first president of the United States to serve as chairman of the United Nations Security Council. Harry Truman, who oversaw the establishment of the UN, never did it. Neither did Eisenhower, the general who defeated Nazism in Europe. No other president did either—not even Ronald Reagan after he called upon Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, or George H. W. Bush with his new world order.
But Barack Hussein Obama was a new kind of American president.
The media hailed the move as signaling a “new co-operative relationship between the US and the United Nations.”6 Gone were the days when the United States would stand against the initiatives restricting free speech sponsored by the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Gone were the days when the United States would stand with Israel against the hypocritical condemnations that would rain down upon it from the communist and Islamic blocs. By chairing the Security Council session, Barack Obama was signaling that America was no longer singular in the world, no longer the lodestar of free people around the globe, no more exceptional than any other country.
Barack Obama’s America was just another country, a large and still strong country, to be sure, but not one that stood any longer against authoritarianism—no longer the leader of the free world, but now the leader of the globalist initiative to unify the world’s government and economy, and enforce a drab uniformity.
Obama’s chairing of the Security Council session only put an official stamp on a series of initiatives he had been pursuing in this direction since long before he became president. As soon as he became president, he took decisive steps to submit American sovereignty to the will of international bodies.
THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT CLAIMS JURISDICTION
In March 2009, the Obama administration dropped the term “enemy combatant” for the prisoners still being held at the Guantánamo Bay detention center, and instead adopted international laws of war as the basis for holding the accused jihad terrorists there. Attorney General Eric Holder explained: “As we work towards developing a new policy to govern detainees, it is essential that we operate in a manner that strengthens our national security, is consistent with our values, and is governed by law.”
Not American law, international law. Norming. The Justice Department announced proudly that its new policy “draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress.”7
Several months later, the Obama administration opened the door to extending the norms of international law not only to jihadists in Gitmo, but to the American troops who had put them there.
In August 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “expressed ‘great regret’… that the U.S. is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC). This has fueled speculation that the Obama administration may reverse another Bush policy and sign up for what could lead to the trial of Americans for war crimes in The Hague.”8 George W. Bush had refused in May 2002 to accept the jurisdiction of the ICC—precisely because of the prospect of American troops being tried for war crimes on highly politicized grounds.9
Whether Obama signed on to the court or not, the ICC itself seemed determined to assert jurisdiction over Americans. The chief prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, claimed that he had the authority to investigate allegations of American war crimes in Afghanistan, and to prosecute American military personnel accordingly, even if the Obama administration did not agree. “I prosecute whoever is in my jurisdiction,” Ocampo insisted. “I cannot allow that we are a court just for the Third World. If the First World commits crimes, they have to investigate, if they don’t, I shall investigate. That’s the rule and we have one rule for everyone.”10 Not coincidentally, on the windowsill in Ocampo’s office is a photograph of himself with the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa.11
The idea that American troops might have committed war crimes in Afghanistan that warranted their being placed into the same category as Sudan’s Omar Bashir was one that could have occurred only to a rabid anti-American ideologue. Bashir, after all, murdered hundreds of thousands of people in a jihad-inspired genocide.
The Obama administration further opened the door to war-crimes prosecutions of American troops by praising the ICC’s work in other areas. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, praised the court as an “important and credible instrument for trying to hold accountable the senior leadership responsible for atrocities committed in the Congo, Uganda and Darfur.” Ben Chang, spokesman for Obama’s national security advisor, General James Jones, agreed: “We support the ICC in its pursuit of those who’ve perpetrated war crimes.”12 Obama himself has said that “it is in America’s interests that these most heinous of criminals, like the perpetrators of the genocide in Darfur, are held accountable. These actions are a credit to the cause of justice and deserve full American support and cooperation.”13
The Bush administration had also praised the prosecution of Bashir, but at the same time Bush championed the American Service-members Protection Act, which expressed disapproval of the ICC.14
Would Obama likewise stand up for America and her defenders? Unlikely. The British author and columnist Gerald Warner observed correctly that joining the ICC would “flatter Obama’s ego as the conscience of the world. It would also put US servicemen at the mercy of any American-hating opportunists who might choose to arraign them on trumped-up charges before an alien court whose judges are likely to be ill-disposed towards America too.” Some of those “American-hating opportunists” would be Americans themselves: “So, vengeful Democrats could facilitate the indictment of President George W. Bush and all his senior commanders in Iraq.”15
What’s more, such war-crimes trials would be enormously popular in the Islamic world—the very region that the post-American president was so anxious to accommodate.
In pursuit of that accommodation, O
bama’s internationalism also quickly manifested itself as a distaste for the freedom of speech.
THE WAR ON FREE SPEECH AND OBAMA’S INTERNATIONAL AGENDA
In a crushing blow to the freedom of speech worldwide, the United Nations Human Rights Council in March 2009 approved a resolution calling upon member states to provide legal “protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general.”16
Hatred, discrimination, intimidation, coercion, defamation, and incitement according to whom? In whose eyes?
To ask the question was to reveal the authoritarian nature of the resolution. It was designed to be a tool in the hands of the powerful, enabling them to silence the powerless.
While the resolution speaks of religion in general, the proposal came from Pakistan and had the backing of the powerful fifty-seven-government Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). (It also bears noting that there is no Organization of the Jewish Conference or Organization of the Christian Conference at the UN.) The OIC is the UN’s largest, most powerful, and most influential voting bloc—so it was clear that Islam was the only religion the drafters of the resolution had in mind. In fact, it was the only one specifically mentioned. This was underscored by the fact that Muslim states worked energetically to make “Islamophobia” the focus of Durban II—the UN’s second World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.
Post-American Presidency Page 2