President Trump: Threading the Eye of the Needle
President Jimmy Carter should be remembered for one thing.
That thing - is the one magnificent success (The Camp David Accords, Feb. 1979) that managed to overshadow the many glaring mistakes of his administration. He was a weak and overly sentimental American President. He was weakened and not strengthened by his Christian faith, when it came to his naive trust of the other and his inordinate focus on human rights. He bungled more than he got right.
He championed support of black majority rule in a handful of African nations. The subsequnt rise of the tribal despot caused the flight of Western investment in the region and created massive instability as "self determination" movements took hold and sent the region leap-frogging backward centuries into the past. The Africans voted in their "best" which morphed into their worst fears. We took the training wheels off, and violence began to race across the terrain.
We have not fully recovered from President Carter's seemingly compassionate dalliances in Latin America. We traded a measure of strategic control and our own pride of place in the region as we were forced to deal with the rise of the unknown (in leadership). I have always stated that human rights is what a Sovereign grants his citizens. It is not what America offers to them. We offer that to our own.
We do offer to the "other" economic assistance and memorandum of agreement, treaties, things which are beneficial to all involved. And it is hoped that the bottom line for the nation's workforce will find not only temporary relief, but sustained prosperity. But we do not go to war for human rights. It is an incredibly bad plan. If that is the case, let's just be done with it and attack China. Oops.
What President Carter is not remembered for is how an emboldened Moscow pursued a course of funding and training terrorists; and the world began to experience an increased operational tempo of highly organized and efficiently executed terror attacks. Moscow is not really a bear. She is a scent hound and in Carter, the raccoon (our intelligence services) was effectively treed.
Every American President is tasked with threading the needle. It becomes increasingly difficult to do in an age with an explosion of technology which is accompanied by the speed dating which is being done between our most significant enemies and the proxies whom they now train "Moscow style".
I believe our current POTUS is threading the needle quite well. Grateful to be an American.
Tammy
Comments
Post a Comment