AMERICA IS A HORROR TO HER FRIENDS AND LAUGHED AT BY HER ENEMIES

Since entering office last January, President Barack Hussein Obama has struck a hard-line position against America’s friends such as Israel, while adopting a soft, even apologetic line toward America’s enemies such as Iran and its allies.

For eight months, Obama has sought to force Israel to the wall. He has loudly and repeatedly ordered the Netanyahu government to prevent all private and public construction for Jews in Israel’s capital city and its heartland in order to facilitate the eventual mass expulsion of Jews from both areas, which he believes ought to become part of a Jew-free Palestinian state.

Obama made no equivalent demands of the Palestinians. He did not precondition talks on freezing illegal Arab construction in Jerusalem, or on dismantling the Aksa Martyrs Brigades terrorist group, or even simply on setting aside the Palestinian demand that Israel release convicted terrorists from its prisons.

To the contrary, he has energetically supported the establishment of a Palestinian unity government between Fatah and Hamas – which the US State Department has since 1995 designated as a foreign terrorist organization to which US citizens, including the US president, are required by law to give no quarter.

As for Iran, during his meeting with Netanyahu in May, Obama gave the clear impression that the Iranian regime had until September to accept his offer to negotiate the disposition of its nuclear installations. But it is now September, and in its belated response to Obama’s generous offer of engagement, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime rejected the terms of Obama’s engagement out of hand.

Obama did not retaliate by taking his offer to negotiate off the table or – perish the thought – working to implement the sanctions he had pledged would follow an Iranian rejection of his open hand.

Instead, Obama announced that he is sending a senior US official to meet with the Iranians on October 1. And with that announcement, any residual doubt that Obama is willing to live in a world in which Iran is armed with nuclear weaponry dissipated completely.

In the meantime, in his address to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday (9/23) and in his remarks at his meeting with Netanyahu and Abbas on Tuesday (9/22), Obama made clear that, in the words of former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, he has "put Israel on the chopping block."

He referred to Israeli communities located beyond the 1949 armistice lines as "illegitimate."  Moreover, Obama explained that Israel can no longer expect US support for its security if it doesn’t bow to his demand that it surrender all of the land it has controlled since 1967.

Apparently it is immaterial to the US leader that if Israel fulfilled his demand, the Jewish state would render itself defenseless against enemy attack and so embolden its neighbors to invade. That is, it matters not to Obama that were Israel to fulfill his demand, the prospect of an Arab war against Israel would rise steeply.

The fact that Obama made these deeply antagonistic statements about Israel at the UN in itself exposes his hostility toward the country. The UN’s institutional hostility toward Israel is surpassed only by that of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Since Obama took office, he has been abandoning one US ally after another while seeking to curry favor with one US adversary after another. At every turn, America’s allies – from Israel to Honduras, to Columbia, South Korea and Japan, to Poland and the Czech Republic – have reacted with disbelief and horror to his treachery.

And at every turn, America’s adversaries – from Iran to Venezuela to North Korea and Russia – have responded with derision and contempt to his seemingly obsessive attempts to appease them.

The horror Obama has instilled in America’s friends and the contempt he has evoked from its enemies have not caused him to change course. The fact that his policies throughout the world have already failed to bring a change in the so-called international community’s treatment of the US has not led him to reconsider those policies.

As many Western Europeans have begun to openly acknowledge, the man they once likened to the messiah is nothing but a politician – and a weak, bungling one at that. Even Britain’s Economist is laughing at him.

But Obama is unmoved by any of this, and as his speech at the UN General Assembly made clear, he is moving full speed ahead in his plans to subordinate US foreign policy to the UN.

His stubborn insistence on advancing his feckless foreign policy in the face of its already apparent colossal failure is of a piece with his unswerving commitment to his domestic agenda in spite of its apparent colossal failure.

Obama’s economic stimulus package failed to stimulate the US economy and increased the US’s economic deficit to heights undreamed of by his predecessors.

His nationalization of major US corporations like General Motors, his cash-for-clunkers program to stimulate the US auto industry and his massive encroachments on the banking and financial industries have done nothing to increase economic growth in the US and indeed, unemployment has reached generational highs.

And yet, rather than reconsider his belief in vastly expanding the size of the federal government’s control over the private sector, Obama has insistently pushed for further governmental control over the US economy – most notably in his drive to transform the US health care industry.

Both Obama’s supporters and his opponents have claimed that his presidency may well stand or fall on his ability to pass a health care reform law in the coming months. But the fact of the matter is that if he succeeds in passing such a law, his success will be a Pyrrhic victory because Obama has promised that his plan will do the impossible, and therefore it will unquestionably fail.

He has promised that the health care plan he supports will increase access to health services and improve their quality, but simultaneously will not increase the size of the federal deficit or be funded with tax hikes – and this is impossible. Obama’s health care plan will fail either to pass into law, or if it becomes law, it will fail to live up to his promises.

Obama’s failures in both foreign and domestic policy have weakened him politically. His response to this newfound weakness has been to put himself into the public eye seemingly around the clock. Apparently the thinking behind the move is that while Obama’s policies are unpopular, Obama’s personal popularity remains high, so if he personalizes his policies, it will become more difficult for his opponents to argue against them.

But alas, this policy too has failed. The more Obama exposes himself, the less he is able to leverage his personal celebrity into political power.

The weaker Obama becomes politically, the more readily Democrats and liberal reporters alike will acknowledge that attacking US allies while scraping and bowing before US foes is a ridiculous strategy for foreign affairs. Certainly no self-proclaimed realist can defend a policy based on denuding the US of its power and forsaking a US-based international system for one dictated by its foes.

It is true that a weakened Obama will seek to win cheap points by putting the squeeze on Israel. But it is also true that the weaker Obama becomes, the less capable he will be of carrying through on his bullying threats against Israel and against fellow democracies around the world.

Caroline Glick is the Deputy Managing Editor of the Jerusalem Post. As an American citizen, in 2013 she would be considered for Deputy Secretary of State under John Bolton in the Palin Administration.