Throwing elbows?

Coming as it does amid tensions sparked between the US and Russian security services by the Boston Marathon bombing, this should get a big hmmmmm.  Russia took the unusual step of arresting an American attache to the US Embassy in Moscow for espionage: Russia’s security services say they detained a U.S. diplomat they claim is a [...]

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Respect.

And the British government is apparently unhappy about it, too.  Sources within Whitehall told the Daily Mail that the Obama administration’s decision to skip sending an envoy to what has become a de facto state funeral for one of America’s staunchest Cold War allies came before the Boston terrorist attack yesterday, and that the White House [...]

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Smart power.

For some reason, American politicians in both parties want to see the US intervene to some extent in Syria’s civil war, even after the disastrous intervention in Libya that almost made Mali an al-Qaeda state.  Only a French military intervention prevented that outcome, and that may still only be temporary, but more on that in [...]

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Hmmm.

Talk about mixed messages.  While Pyongyang blusters about re-entering a state of war with Seoul and Washington and announces that its missiles are on alert and aimed at American targets, the Kim regime suddenly made its only known “reformer” the official face of the Kim regime:  North Korea’s parliament named former premier Pak Pong-ju, who was [...]

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Irked.

One reason that Senate alums get easy rides in confirmation hearings is the presumption that as members of the club, they represent a close tie to a presidential administration and their activities.  It supposedly eases the communication gap between the White House and Capitol Hill, as the appointee will have personal contact with the men [...]

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Reset.

Say, remember when Mitt Romney called Russia the “number one geopolitical foe” for the US during the presidential campaign?  The media wrote Romney off as hopelessly trapped in Cold War history.  Vice President Joe Biden even derided Romney in an April 2012 speech for referring to Russians as “Soviets,” accusing the Republican nominee of being [...]

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Russia moving toward US on Syria?

In the summer of 2012, Barack Obama talked tough about “red lines” for Syria and the regime’s chemical weapons.  In a rare press conference on August 20th, the President warned Bashar Assad that the US was prepared to act if Assad began to move his chemical weapons as a precursor to their use, emphasis mine: [...]

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Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Say, how has Barack Obama’s Arab Spring policy worked out for us so far?  Well, we bombed one dictator out of power in Libya, which set that nation free … to have terrorist networks openly operate and control the eastern part of the country, which resulted in the sacking of our consulate in Benghazi, and [...]

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Protocol.

Via Andrew Malcolm, we have a pre-holiday bit of frivolity for Hot Air readers, and perhaps an example of the media tilt I mentioned in an earlier post.  When George W. Bush gave Angela Merkel an unannounced (and unwanted) neck massage, the media turned it into a narrative of his diplomatic ineptitude.  We haven’t heard [...]

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Smart power strikes again.

I doubt anyone reading Hot Air will mind this, but it looks like the UN won’t get a chance to dictate terms of the Second Amendment any time soon.  Yesterday evening, talks on an international arms-trade treaty collapsed when the US and a few other nations demanded an extension of time before committing to a [...]

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Transmissions and flexibility.

Three years ago, the Obama administration gave Russia a “reset” button. Three months ago, Barack Obama asked Russian president Dmitri Medvedev to transmit a request to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for some diplomatic space on missile defense, promising that Obama would have “more flexibility” after the election for … something.  How has all of that smart [...]

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Entire families shot in their homes by Assad's forces.

Remember when the Obama administration demanded that Hosni Mubarak had to go “yesterday,” bombed Moammar Qaddafi, and then insisted that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad was a “reformer”?  The city of Houla became the latest recipient of Assad’s “reforms,” as 108 people got massacred by government forces and their allies: The U.N.’s human rights office on [...]

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US official told him to leave the embassy?

The story of Chinese democracy activist Chen Guangcheng took a bizarre turn this morning.  The dissident escaped house arrest and ended up at the US embassy in Beijing, with an injury to his foot in the escape.  The US then announced that they had negotiated safe passage to a hospital with the Chinese government, where [...]

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Smart power.

The big news last week from the Summit of the Americas was the Secret Service sex scandal, which had some in the Obama administration lamenting that no one paid much attention to Barack Obama’s efforts in Cartagena, Colombia to improve relations between the US and its allies.  Today, the White House might be hoping for [...]

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Overplaying the hand?

It didn’t take long for Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to respond to Mitt Romney’s assertion that his country is the “number one geopolitical foe” of the US.  Medvedev told American presidential candidates to “check their clocks,” as the year is 2012 and “not the mid-1970s”: Romney clarified his statement yesterday by defining the “foe” remark [...]

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Retreat from the retreat?

After a day of spin from the White House didn’t tamp down outrage over Barack Obama’s sotto voce conversation with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, the President himself addressed the controversy.  Earlier today, Obama insisted that nothing he told Medvedev was out of the ordinary, and that he wasn’t “hiding the ball” on missile defense: A [...]

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"The Obama administration knife[d] Britain in the back again ..."

Remember when Barack Obama promised to restore our standing with America’s allies and exercise “smart power” in diplomacy?  Good times, good times.  In the latest dispute over the Falkland Islands, Obama has failed to support our closest ally on the world stage even after their military and diplomatic support for our wars in Iraq and [...]

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Better late than never?

When Egypt’s population began widespread demonstrations against the Hosni Mubarak regime, it took Barack Obama eight days to demand the resignation of our nominal ally in Cairo.  When Moammar Qaddafi began a campaign of military attacks on his own people to suppress a revolt, it took us just a few weeks to launch an undeclared [...]

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Smart power.

Say, remember when the Obama administration sent Hillary Clinton to Geneva with a “reset button” for Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to show that they would improve US-Russian relations, in large part to put more pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear-weapons program?  Recall when Barack Obama betrayed the Poles — on the 70th anniversary [...]

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Smart power?

Has Barack Obama’s foreign policy led us to become a “turncoat nation”? First, as Bill Whittle carefully explains in his latest Firewall video, one has to understand what “turncoat” actually means. It doesn’t indicate treason, but switching sides — with a healthy inference of surrender, to boot. Certainly we see that in the sudden desire [...]

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