Tunku Varadarajan: Obama's Emasculation of America

I LOVE TO READ AND LEARN FROM GREAT WRITERS AND CLEAR THINKERS. Writers who say what I wish I'd said exactly the way they do with a minimum of words.

None of late has caught my fancy and attention more than the conservative man who writes at The Daily Beast from time-to-time whose name I can neither pronounce nor spell. Even my favorite tech invention Spellcheck freezes up when it tries to decipher his name in my copy.

Tunku Varadarajan is his name. (It suggests turnkey for his first name and gives up with no suggestions for the second.) From here on, I'll refer to him as TV. Anyway, TV has done a piece on Obama's nuclear weapons policy announcement that I think is extremely worthwhile. I couldn't agree more. He starts out saying what I said in my post yesterday:

Consider me unimpressed. Barack Obama’s ballyhooed “Nuclear Posture Review” has turned out, in truth, to be more “posture” than “review.”

As has been pointed out by a prominent parser of all things nuclear, the new policy actually changes very little: We weren’t going to nuke Brazil before the review and we’re still asserting the right to nuke North Korea if we need to. And even my nuclear-layman’s eye detects the thrust of platitude in the president’s assertion that, henceforward, the U.S. would “only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.” Does the president mean to tell us that his predecessors were free to consider the use of nukes in humdrum circumstances to defend trivial interests?

THEN TV's piece takes an interesting turn as he talks about the auto-emasculation of our country:

I despair of this latest episode of gestural theater designed to make the U.S. look exquisitely reasonable (should we call it “Jimmy-Cartesian”?), but which in truth results in the U.S. looking flaccid, or worse, complacent. After all, who gains from a presidential posture that has, in effect, stigmatized our most potent deterrent?

In terms of foreign policy—or, better put, foreign clout—the U.S. is going through a startling period of auto-emasculation. Barack Obama has discarded his predecessor’s big stick—the wielding of which should have confirmed the flaws not of big sticks but of his predecessor—and replaced it with a mission of almost messianic outreach to our foes and most adamant competitors (while, at the same time, snubbing allies like Britain, Israel and India....

I hope you'll read TV's entire piece. More than anything else, I grieve how Obama's policies continue to embolden our enemies, and also make our president look like a feckless neophyte hellbent on degrading and emasculating our country.