Opinion

BEDFORD: The Real Reason Obama’s Foreign Policy Has Failed

Christopher Bedford Former Editor in Chief, The Daily Caller News Foundation
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President Barack Obama announced on Tuesday that China had agreed to sign another treaty with the United States. This one, to “combat climate change.”

The American president, his top diplomat and his cheerleaders in the media could barely contain their excitement– this, they loudly proclaimed, had been the No. 1 goal of their China diplomacy.

“This is also a milestone in the United States-China relationship,” Mr. Kerry wrote in a completely serious New York Times op-ed.

“This is a major milestone in the U.S.-China relationship,” Mr. Obama agreed.

“You have to start by showing you’re serious,” Mr. Kerry told his State Department team, without a trace of irony.

But the sad fact is that Messrs. Kerry and Obama accomplished the opposite of showing China — or anyone outside the radical green movement — that they are “serious” about anything.

Because this means the president of the United States thinks a global warming treaty is more important than Americans’ ability to do business in China, caused by Beijing’s hostility toward foreign investment, strict command over the country’s economy, and artificial currency manipulation– leading to a massive trade deficit.

Because this means the leader of the free world thinks a global warming treaty is more important than two months of Hong Kong’s peaceful, democratic protests. The protesters have repeatedly been attacked by government-sponsored gangs, and the threat of more severe force has hung heavy over the crowd, with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping calling the protests “illegal” as he stood beside Mr. Obama. Indeed, he pushed Mr. Obama to declare that the U.S. will have no role in supporting the democrats, despite being legally bound by international treaty and U.S. law to do so.

Because this means the commander in chief thinks a global warming treaty is more important than years of Chinese interests mining Africa of its fossil fuels and absolutely essential rare earth minerals under the protection of a U.S. security umbrella, all while American interests — private, federal and military — have been penetrated and compromised by Chinese hackers determined to steal the economic and military advantages produced by our free society.

Because this means the United States’ top man thinks a global warming treaty is more important than decades of allied, democratic governments being bullied and intimidated as Beijing grows increasingly belligerent, literally manufacturing vast, artificial territorial claims over the oil fields of the South China Sea, stockpiling arms against Taiwan, rattling its saber at Japan and propping up a madman in North Korea.

Because this means the most powerful man in the West thinks a global warming treaty is more important than the communist government in Beijing, which over the past 70 years has murdered tens of millions of its own citizens. At the very moment the president was in town, Beijing was torturing and imprisoning tens of thousands of political and religious prisoners, forcibly aborting Chinese babies and censoring ideas both foreign and domestic. “There is no freedom of religion in China, there is no freedom of speech in China,” Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Executive Director Marion Smith told The Daily Caller fresh off a trip to Hong Kong. “It is an authoritarian state totally ruled by the Communist Party.”

Indeed, the White House thought so little about that, they decided that China was a good place to announce that the administration was pushing for increased government control over the Internet. “Sometimes [Mr. Obama] can be negligent in the symbolism,” former senior White House adviser David Axelrod once conceded.

So just what’s in this global warming treaty the Obama administration thinks is more important than the U.S. economy, preserving a free island under threat from dictatorship, protecting our military and technological interests, hedging an expansive aggressor and addressing systemic human rights abuses?

“While the U.S. has to cut back its fossil fuel consumption and suffer through artificially higher energy costs, China only made vague promises of emissions cuts,” The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Mike Bastasch reports(RELATED: Media Describes Obama-China Climate Deal As ‘Historic’ Success)

China can emit all the greenhouse gases it wants until 2030,” Mr. Bastasch continues, “while giving no firm commitment to exactly what emissions level it will peak at and how much it would reduce its reliance on fossil fuels by. China only promised its ‘best efforts’ to peak emissions while boosting its green energy use by 2030.” (RELATED: Obama Gets Only Vague Promises From China On Global Warming Efforts)

So essentially, Messrs. Obama and Kerry accomplished less than nothing while hailing it as a “milestone” that shows how “serious” the United States is.

“It’s pretty strange that, globally, not only the U.N., but developed country leaders are spending so much time on, quote, climate change,” Peabody Energy CEO Greg Boyce said last week. “They aren’t focusing on how you eliminate poverty, eliminate energy poverty and start driving global economic activity.”

“Does the administration actually listen when people start saying there are aspects of Chinese behavior that are extremely worrisome, extremely dangerous, and they don’t seem to be cutting back?” the Heritage Foundation Asian Studies Center’s Dean Cheng asked TheDC. “Signing another agreement, another joint statement, is not going to change that. Because what we’ve seen is the Chinese initial these agreements, and then plow forward.”

But Wednesday morning’s revelations really bring the entire debacle of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy nightmare into focus: The president of the United States is not “serious” in his priorities, in his words or in his deeds. And every world leader, from Syria to China, Iran to Russia, Israel to Ukraine, knows it.

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