New America Bowing to Old America

There exist American commentators who say that the world was changed on September 11, 2001 because America was changed on that day by the attack that took place on its soil. Now, twelve years later, voices are rising to make the point that America and the world have been changing since January of 2009 as a result of Barack Obama becoming President of the United States.

Two things are typically American in this give and take. First, the Americans have always talked, and they continue to talk about the world as if it were a satellite that is revolving around Planet America. Second, when something goes wrong, the Americans never see the fault as being their own. And this is because in their eyes, America is the land of “exceptional” things. Thus, the fault must be that of the foreigners who take advantage of it, seeing its President – whomever he may be at the time – as failing to run the nation the way it should be run. The result of this mentality is that structural changes are hard to bring about in America especially if they are necessitated by a world that is evolving on its own rather than revolve around Planet America.

But the reality is that heavyweight America; the one towards which many things used to gravitate in the old days, is no longer the only heavyweight nation in the world today. This may come as a surprise to the generation that grew up when America was not only a heavy planet but a full-fledged star shining brightly in a universe that was theirs to explore and to conquer. But to those of us who came of age in the decade of the 1950s, and began to ask questions about the world, we still remember the debates that started even a decade earlier predicting that the day will come when the world will have evolved into a multi-polar planet. It was said that in this world, America will only be one of the poles, not the only pole. As we grew up, we saw the world move in that direction with every passing decade without ever looking back at a unipolar planet.

However, if there must be a moment we can call demarcation line to symbolize the change in America's place in the world, that moment should be the 2008 spectacle of the Secretary of the Treasury falling to his knees in front of the Speaker of the House begging her to let pass legislation allowing the bailout of America's financial institutions. This is the image which best represents the new America; the one that genuflected in front of the old America begging it to invoke its old good name, and call on the goodwill of the world to bail it out as it was about to implode into a pile of economic junk.

What we need to understand is that this moment did not come about spontaneously but was in the making since right after World War II. While acknowledging that no one can tell how history would have evolved if this incident had not taken place, or if that idea was not pursued in the past, I posit that the world would be different today if Winston Churchill had not persuaded the Americans to trigger the Cold War era by taking an adversarial stance with regard to the Soviet Union. I cannot help but think that what happened under Yeltsin would have happened four decades earlier under Khrushchev had it not been for Churchill's interference.

And this brings us to an article that was written by Daniel Pipes. It has the title: “Obama's Foreign-Policy Fiasco” and the subtitle: “This administration has helped make us irrelevant in the Middle East.” It was published on August 23, 2013 in National Review Online. The word irrelevant – seen in the subtitle – remains important because it represents a great deal in the context of this discussion. Like Shamir's: “Zey know nossing about za damacarcy” which turned America into a Middle Eastern joke, it was Sharon's: “Yasser Arafat is irrelevant” that made America itself irrelevant. It happened first in the Middle East, then happened again in the rest of the world when people like Daniel Pipes and John Bolton started to describe the United Nations as irrelevant.

For these reasons, it should not come as a shock to see Pipes lament that America is no longer what it used to be when: “America's economic size, technological edge, military prowess, and basic decency meant that … the U.S. counted as much as or more than any other state.” All this being evident, his observation is irrefutable. But where the writer goes wrong is when he applies his Jewish mentality in addition to his American mentality to analyzing the situation and to drawing conclusions.

His American mentality leads him to conclude that America's troubles were caused by President Barack Obama under whose leadership “the United States has slid into shocking irrelevance in the Middle East.” He expands on that by saying that even the weakness and indifference of Carter and Clinton yielded better results than the inconsistency, incompetence, and inaction of Obama. He would have preferred to see strong and active presidents like Ronald Reagan who helped speed up the collapse of the Soviet Union, and George W. Bush who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.

As to his Jewish mentality, it leads him to make false comparisons, a trait that causes him and many other Jewish writers to draw false conclusions. In the context of this discussion, he says that Obama behaves as if America were as small as Belgium, especially when it comes to casting votes at the UN. He goes on to say that this makes America “lead from behind.” But what this sort of talk does to the readers is that it prompts them to ask questions such as: Do all small nations vote one way, and all big nations vote the opposite way? Moreover, each time that America casts a veto against a resolution that favors Palestine, does it do so because Belgium has shown it the way? If so, is he suggesting this should stop?

Another mind boggling comparison that Pipes, the Jew makes involves Qatar – a nation that is 1400 times smaller than America. He chides Obama for not doing what the emirs of Doha do, which is to help the rebels in Syria instead of dithering. Would it be following from the front if Obama followed the emirs of Doha? Pipes does not answer this question but gives another example: “They provide billions to the new leadership in Egypt, he stumbles over himself.” A little later, he expands on that thought with the following: “The 1.5 billion in annual U.S. aid to Egypt suddenly looks paltry in comparison with the $12 billion from three Persian Gulf countries.” Does that mean he wants Obama to compete with the Gulf States in the game of throwing money at Egypt?” I'm sure some people would find this idea a delicious one.

That is Jewish mentality; there is no doubt about it, but there is something even more Jewish than that. It is that Pipes again chides Obama for pursuing “delusions of an Israeli-Palestinian 'peace process' … in a diplomatic initiative that almost no one believes will end the Arab-Israeli conflict.” And this is the point where you realize that the writer does not see Obama as inactive; he sees him as active, alright, but sees him pursuing the wrong priorities. And you realize this is not new to a Jewish propaganda machine that has always advocated: “Give us the tools and we'll do the job” which translates into give us the weapons; give us gobs of money, and we'll slaughter the Palestinians till we finish them off, or they flee Palestine leaving all of it to us.

But if Pipes says hands off the Middle East when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, what is there to be concerned about in that region or anywhere else in the world for that matter? Aha, that's a good question; it is the big one, he seems to be saying. And the first thought he advances in response to it concerns Obamacare which, he says, the President must drop in favor of treating foreign policy not as an afterthought like he does now, but as a juicy matter, the way he treats the American issues.

This prompts the question: What about foreign policy? And the author gives his answer in a form that carries the preoccupation of Israel and the American Jewish lobby at this time. He writes: “Iran could soon achieve nuclear breakout.” Basically, what this boils down to is that Obama must forget about American issues such as Obamacare, he must forget about the Middle East peace process, and he must concentrate on working to destroy Iran.

Why is that? you ask, and he responds: “America is a force for good … the world needs an assertive United States.” Assertive? you ask. How assertive? And pipes responds by quoting the historian Walter McDougall who said that the American civilization “perturbs the trajectories of all others just by existing.” To this, Pipes adds the lamentation: “there isn't much perturbation these days” and he follows with the hope that “the dismal present [will] be brief in duration.”

And so, we see that the America which could do things just by existing, cannot do them now even by being active. It was inevitable that America's position should change because the rest of the world was catching up with it. But America need not have lost the kind of influence that friends normally maintain with each other. Yet America did lose that, and the reason is now clear. It is that America misbehaved when it started to become active. It was made to act in the wrong direction with the sort of advice that was given by Churchill yesteryear, and the sort of advice that is currently given by the Jewish lobby year after year.

Daniel Pipes prays that the dismal present, as he calls it, be brief. It may well be so but not because America will regain its old aura; he can be certain of that. It will be because things will continue to get worse as long as America will continue to listen to people such as Daniel Pipes, to the officers that make up the Jewish lobby, and to the characters that freelance as unofficial lobbyists for Israel.

And bowing to its past may not save it in the nick of time next time around. Only a change in behavior will.