The Very Softest of Powers

The weekend rocket launch by North Korea capped off what has been a remarkably successful first quarter for the world’s most toxic regimes and troublesome bad actors.

President Obama said that he wants the U.S. to lead not by force, but by example. However no one is following. This means that there is, at this time, no world leader among nations. There is no unipolarity, but there is also no multipolarity. Declinists who thought American influence would be challenged (or augmented) by “emerging Asian superpowers” have been made irrelevant by the global economic crisis.

Influence is now in the hands of bad actors that see the Free World’s reluctance to take a stand.

They and their enablers within international bodies are setting the global agenda. Everyone else is reacting. In three months, the Obama administration has not failed one foreign policy test but six, by this reckoning. The only national security areas in which the president has acted soundly are in Iraq and Afghanistan. And those have been matters of continuing or expanding Bush policies...

[I.e., as always, any void in moral leadership is quickly being filled by the despots of the world. We can regret that human truism, but we deny it at peril.

Highly Recommended for the specific examples that support the above conclusions > ]

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