Euro Arrogance And Amero Incompetance

TW: Continuing a theme about which I have blogged several times and will blog repeatedy once Obama's election is confirmed, 0ur international friends have had a near free fire zone relative to griping about US foreign policy over the past eight years. With new leadership the US has an opportunity to re-shape and re-construct institutions and policies that have grown out-dated and tired not only over the past several years but the past decades. But it will require the international partners to step up as well rather than bathe in their alleged but generally fruitless intellectual superiority.

From Roger Cohen at NYT:
"Zapatero [Spanish Prime Minister] is a wry, polished, suave politician, a socialist with that European socialist habit of being amused by almost everything and committed to almost nothing. It's fair to say his view of the United States is cool, colored by a relationship with President Bush that started badly and never got better...I relate all this because the unhappy saga of U.S.-Spanish relations reflects bungled American foreign policy. It's one thing to have a disagreement between friends, another to have discord fester through spite. Bush's vengeful streak is worthy of the schoolyard.

The United States is weakened when it's feuding with its allies. The so-called coalition in Iraq has emptied that word of meaning.

Barack Obama gets this. A weakened United States, militarily stretched and economically snared, cannot be cavalier about its alliances. McCain, to judge by his refusal to say he would meet Zapatero, is still in muscle-flexing mode. That's the last thing we need.

My second reason for relating this is that Zapatero is the kind of guy who reminds me of the need for smart American leadership. In fact, he reminds me of why, raised in Europe, I chose to become an American.

Despite Spain's dictatorial past under Franco, Zapatero seemed to me mealy-mouthed about totalitarianism and tyranny. Moral relativism oozed from his lawyerly repartee.

Zapatero is also wrong about the United States. He said it is a "diverse, creative, dynamic" country, but "it does not need to have a mission."

But America was born as an idea and cannot be itself unless it carries that idea forward. That's the tragedy of the Bush years: the undermining of American ideals. The United States is inseparable from the hope it has given Emma Lazarus' "huddled masses yearning to be free;" it is bound to the struggle to ensure that, as Lincoln put it, "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.' "
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/08/opinion/edcohen.php