QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 6:27 P.M. ET:  From Charles Krauthammer, speaking before the Heritage Foundation:

In the real world, as opposed to what French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls President Barack Obama's "virtual world," America faces the reality of Iran's intransigence and aggressiveness; China's headlong pursuit of its own national, regional, and global interests; Russia's determination to regain its Near Abroad; the Arab states' refusal to accept any kind of a reasonable settlement of the kind that Israel has already offered under several governments; Syria's designs on Lebanon; and Hugo Chávez's designs on the weaker countries in Latin America. President Obama's foreign policy agenda of gradual American retreat will have inexorable consequences: When erstwhile allies see the American umbrella being withdrawn, they will have to accommodate themselves to those from whom we were protecting them. If Obama proves impervious to empirical evidence and experience, all these accommodations, the weakening of alliances, the strengthening of centers of adversarial power in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, and elsewhere will continue until we are awakened by some cataclysm.

COMMENT:  Excellent observation.  True, Obama has continued some of Bush's policies, especially in Afghanistan.  But, overall, American foreign policy is weakening.  It is also drifting.  Our opponents see, not resolve, but confusion, and a president dragged by his party's leftist (not liberal) wing into policies strangely reminiscent of the 1930s.

The neoconservatives are regularly ridiculed for saying that our situation feels like 1939.  But they're right.  It feels like 1939.  History, of course, doesn't repeat itself.  It's the psychology of history that repeats itself.  And we see a disturbing tendency today to go back to the kind of thinking – appeasement, delays, wishful dreaming, even blaming allies – that led directly to World War II.  And if we have a tragedy, the so-called "realists" will blame the very people who warned of it, after they get finished blaming BUSH (!!).

February 1, 2010