The World is Rejecting Obama

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) rejected the passionate in-person pleas of United States President Barak Obama and his wife on behalf of Chicago's bid to host the 2016 Olympics and instead awarded the bid to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Chicago, Obama's hometown, received the least number of votes among the four cities bidding to host the quadrennial games.

Obama's premise as a presidential candidate was that American allies were not cooperating with the U.S. because of a lack of respect for U.S. President George W. Bush. Obama's liberal supporters supported a change in American foreign policy, which they believed would be better served by a more humble and enlightened leader. They opposed the candidacy of Republican presidential nominee John McCain, whose policies they regarded as too similar to Bush's.

Two examples that Obama and his supporters cited were Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan. In the case of the former, American allies were reluctant to accept Bush's requests to take in terrorist detainees in order to help the U.S. close the facility that its allies opposed. In the latter case, American allies were reluctant to send a significant number of combat troops to Afghanistan to support the American war effort there. However, there are a number of reasons why American allies decline to assist the U.S., none of which were necessarily based upon a lack of respect for Bush in particular.

American allies have declined to accept terrorist detainees for the same reasons that Americans do not want the terrorists on their soil, either. One reason American allies declined to send anything more than a few combat troops to Afghanistan is because they are unable to do so, as they have become increasingly dependent on American protection and have neglected to contribute financially to their own defense.

A reason some allies oppose American policies at times is just for the sake of opposing American policies in order to appear independent from the U.S. to their domestic populations, or out of nationalism, as in the case of the previous French government (which has since been replaced by a more pro-American one), which had declared its policy to be based upon opposition to a unipolar (read: American-led) world.

Another reason American allies sometimes oppose U.S. policies is because they sometimes disagree with the U.S. Their populations especially hold different views from Americans, if not the governments themselves. For example, many Europeans and other Westerners do not regard the Afghan War as their war, but as an American war. Indeed, they do not regard it as any more of a war of necessity than the Liberation of Iraq. They regard both as wars of choice, as they do not even consider the War on Terrorism to be a literal war. Furthermore, they are more concerned about provoking terrorist attacks by siding with the U.S., such as the Madrid bombing by al-Qaeda that resulted in the election of a liberal government that rewarded terrorism by pulling Spanish troops from Iraq as al-Qaeda had demanded.

Bush was nonetheless able to receive much cooperation from allies and others around the world for the War on Terrorism, but American allies oppose American policies at times for their own reasons, not necessarily because of a lack of personal respect for the American president.

Obama and his supporters expected that his personal qualities and anti-American rhetoric would lead to greater cooperation from American allies than Bush received in regard to Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan, but he has not received significantly more support in either case: allies have agreed to accept only a token number of terrorist detainees from Guantanamo and have promised to send only a few more combat troops to Afghanistan.

The rejection of these American requests made by Obama, together with the IOC's rejection of Chicago's bid, disproves the premise held by Obama and his supporters that the lack of allied support for the U.S. was because of Bush. Opposition from American allies and others to U.S. policies and interests is not because of a lack of respect for Obama, per se, any more than it was of Bush, but because Obama's premise held that allied opposition to the U.S. was strictly personal, then he must accept the personal responsibility for allied rejection of himself. Indeed, Obama's premise only served to raise the stakes for his requests to allies for assistance. Obama and his liberal supporters appear to be suffering from the psychological condition of projection, whereby they are projecting domestic attitudes onto foreigners.

Moreover, Obama's anti-American rhetoric appears to be validating anti-Americanism instead of abating it through his emphasis on a change in American foreign policy, a concern I first expressed here in my post, Obama's Anti-American Address to Muslims Fails to Achieve Its Purpose, in regard to Muslims. His rhetoric is apparently having a similar effect on anti-American Westerners.

The world's rejection of Obama's policies is exposing him and his liberal supporters as foolish and their policies as counterproductive, to the detriment of American interests.