◼ In Search of What You Resent - Victor Davis Hanson/PJM
...The subtext of the Obama administration’s Middle East policies — evident in the president’s inaugural interview with al Arabiya, the so-called Cairo speech, the pressures on Israel, the constant trashing of George W. Bush, the reinvention of Islamic terror as workplace violence and man-caused disasters, the outreach to Iran, the outsourcing of responsibility to allies and enemies — is that America has questionable moral stature to help adjudicate anything in the region. To the degree we would exercise our prior influence, it would either be for self-interested purposes or be counterproductive due to our own unsophistication or ill-intentions. So we abdicated, and the predictable followed: one, the world as we know is unraveling, particularly in the Middle East; and, two, most suddenly want more, not less, U.S. engagement.
What explains these paradoxes? No doubt there are the usual suspects. First, the U.S. is privately recognized as a prosperous, free and dynamic society in the way most others nations are not.
Second, such assumptions cannot be publicly expressed for a variety of reasons, ranging from the power of envy, jealousy, and a sense of inferiority to an interest in hoping to guilt the stronger power into some sort of concession, both material and psychological.
Third, there is the assumed assurance for a Maliki, or Central American government, or Middle East autocrat that there are never consequences to anti-Americanism. Or better yet, as in the case of Obama himself, the elite world of the politician, journalist, academic, professional, or rich grandee accepts that anti-Americanism is fashionable, hip even, and that such cheap disdain otherwise should not prevent one from enjoying what America has to offer.
How weird the result: the anti-American Maliki pining for American arms from the escapist American president who lords his American power over others even as he ankles bites the very foundations of such power. Anti-American Latin American governments export their precious youth to the hated U.S., where its oppressive government will take care of them in a way the benevolent socialism at home did not, and the new arrivals will in time become hyphenated Americans with supposedly justified grievances against a largely racist and prejudicial society....
