Betraying Our Friends

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY - Posted Tuesday, March 03, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Appeasing Russia to "solve" Iran's nuclear ambitions is not the only disconcerting feature of President Obama's approach to the world. Vital friends and allies are getting America's cold shoulder.

What sense does it make that after Ronald Reagan wins the Cold War by refusing to abandon missile defense, the United States offers it as a bargaining chip to an increasingly menacing post-Communist Russia?

And where is the wisdom in withdrawing plans to use missile defense to protect the liberated former Eastern Bloc states against a Russian aggressor willing to wage war with the former Soviet state of Georgia and use the Ukrainian pipeline to starve Europeans of natural gas — all to prevent its former satellites from aligning with the free West? Is it any wonder that the Poles and the Czechs — who have only known freedom for a short time — now long for the days of President George W. Bush, a president willing to help them defend their liberty against aggression?

Our young, new president has reportedly written a secret letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev offering to give away the proposed missile shield if Moscow helps stop Iran from building long-range nuclear weapons. Barack Obama supposedly had 300 foreign policy advisers during his presidential campaign. Couldn't one of them have told him that it was Russia who provided Iran with nuclear experts, gave Iran technical information stolen from the West by Russian spies, and is building and delivering fuel for Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant? Has it ever crossed the president's mind that letting Iran give terrorists nuclear bombs to incinerate an American or Western European city might be in Russia's long-term geopolitical interest?

Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman's newly published history of the bomb, "The Nuclear Express," calls post-cold war China — another facilitator of Iran's nuclear program — "a fearsome global competitor with interests that could be well served by the devastation of Washington or New York . . . ." The same surely applies to Vladimir Putin's Russia.

As the president mulled giving away the store to the Russians, he hosted British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the White House Tuesday, claiming that the U.S.-U.K. "special relationship" is getting more special all the time. But the big-spending, tax-raising Brown is well to the left of his predecessor Tony Blair, and the Scot has been a dyed-in-the-wool socialist all his life, writing a 1975 "Red Paper for Scotland" demanding "a positive commitment to creating a socialist society." The president and Brown are joining forces to establish an unprecedented "global new deal" that would impose stringent new bank regulations on industrialized nations.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Tuesday with newly elected Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu and pushed for the establishment of a Palestinian state right at a time when Israelis — suffering continual Palestinian rocket fire — have gone to the polls to place security before the "peace process."

To our south, the Obama administration is jeopardizing our relationship with Colombia over misguided Carteresque human rights quibbles after America has helped that nation make strides in its war against drug cartels — and at a time when the Pentagon reports that Mexico may suffer a "rapid and sudden collapse." A recent Joint Forces Command analysis warns: "(Mexican) politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state." In spite of that dire prospect just across our border, the administration and Congress are foot-dragging on ratification of the Colombian trade pact and funds to continue opposing the drug traffickers and Colombia's leftist insurgency. With Venezuela's Hugo Chavez aligned with Iran and the Castro regime still in business in Cuba, what friend will we have in Latin America if we shun President Alvaro Uribe's government in Colombia?

Barack Obama promised in his campaign to change the world. He never mentioned he would do it by acting against our best allies and partners around the globe — friends we need, and who need us, to stay free and secure.