Der Spiegel On Obama: Another Jimmy Carter

After of year of trying a "nicer" approach to foreign policy even Der Spiegel, a left leaning glossy magazine from Germany is comparing Mr. Obama to the failed presidency of James Earl Carter. You know, the "man from Plains, GA" who was going to bring a softer face to America's appearance to the world...

Obama's advisers fear a comparison with former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, even more than with Bush. Prominent Republicans have already tried to liken Obama to the humanitarian from Georgia, who lost in his bid to win a second term, because voters felt that he was too soft. "Carter tried weakness and the world got tougher and tougher because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators, when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead," Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, recently said. And then he added: "This does look a lot like Jimmy Carter."

But the comparisons to the Carter Administration are easy to make, Mr. Carter repeatedly refused to take strong stands on any foreign policy issue, preferring instead to talk, talk and talk some more. Even when the new Islamic Republic virtually declared war on this country by seizing the Embassy in Tehran, which until the advent of the Carter Doctrine WAS a declaration of war. Mr. Carter preferred to attempt a commando style raid instead of more direct action. A raid, by the way, which ultimately failed. That failure brought world wide derision and was a direct contribution to his being "retired by the electorate". That by the way is the phrase Mr. Carter uses to refer to his crushing defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Once again, we have a President who refuses to pick up the "big stick" as advocated by the first progressive President, Theodore Roosevelt, who's presidency was the first in which America began to genuinely flex our economic and political strength. It was his expansion of American naval power by laying down the first dreadnought class battleships that we as a country began to exert influence around the globe. His send the then Atlantic Fleet on a circumnavigation of the world that America began to show our desire to influence world events.

Mr. Obama on the other hand, seems to be shrinking from our position as the sole world power. Thus the apt comparison to Mr. Carter. By refusing to acknowledge that the recent corrupt election in Iran deserves notice, Mr. Obama,

unlike George W. Bush, who openly supported Iran's pro-American democratic dissidents against the mullahs due to his belief that the advance of freedom in Iran and throughout the world promoted US national interests, Obama supports the anti-American mullahs who butcher these dissidents in the streets and abduct and imprison them by the thousands due to his "hard-nosed" belief that doing so will pave the way for a meeting of the minds with their oppressors.

Yet Obama's policy is anything but realistic. By refusing to support the dissidents, he is not demonstrating that he is a realist. He is showing that he is immune to reality. He is so committed to appeasing the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei that he is incapable of responding to actual events, or even of taking them into account for anything other than fleeting media appearances meant to neutralize his critics.

With a weak foreign policy team as is now in place the comparisons to Mr. Carter a bound to continue and come much more often.