Barack's Foreign Policy Debate with Himself.

On the day when Barack Obama (still hasn't actually) won the Democratic Presidential Nomination, The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto offers a rather interesting example of the foreign policy we should expect should he eventually win the Presidency.

The New York Times reports that Barack Obama staked out an insouciant position on Iran and other U.S. antagonists:

Arguing for engagement with the country's foes, Mr. Obama said in a speech on Sunday that "strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries."

"That's what Reagan did with Gorbachev," he said, adding, "I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela--these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet."

He went on to argue that Iran spends "one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen."

"Let me be absolutely clear," said one candidate the next day in response: "Iran is a grave threat."

If you guessed that the candidate who thought that Iran was a grave threat was John McCain, you were wrong. While McCain has held that position, the candidate who offered the retort was Obama himself.

So, he thinks that Iran is a 'grave threat' but that if they 'ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance.'

[ Michelle Malkin has this, and other Obama gaffes (thus far, at least) HERE. ]

This sounds remarkably like the same sort of 'nuanced' foreign policy that we got from John F. Kerry (who, by the way, served in Vietnam) when he voted for funding the Iraq war before voting against it.

Investors Business Daily continues the critique of Senator Obama's 'latest foray into dangerous naivete', saying he 'consitently demonstrates his lack of qualifications to be Commander-in-Chief based on experience, worldview and judgment'.

I can't find much there to disagree with. They continue:

He went on to defend his policy of "aggressive personal diplomacy" and called for "tough, disciplined and direct diplomacy. That's what Kennedy did. That'd what Reagan did."

Well, not quite.

Kennedy in his inaugural address pledged that "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." That doesn't sound like Obama's policy on Iraq or anywhere else.

Yes, Kennedy talked to Khrushchev. But the Soviet leader came away from that summit so unimpressed with the young and untested American president that the following year he put nuclear missiles in Cuba targeted on American cities. Kennedy was forced to blockade Cuba and risk nuclear war.

We can't risk that with Iran. As John McCain points out, Iran, unlike the Soviet Union, is directly and daily involved in the killing of Americans through training of Iraqi insurgents and arming them with deadly improvised explosive devices. It is a state sponsor of terror that supports Hezbollah in its attempt to turn democratic Lebanon into an Islamofascist state.

Obama said that Reagan's "direct negotiation" with Gorbachev "over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall." What brought down the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet Union, was Reagan's unrelenting resistance to and confrontation with the "evil empire" based on his strategy of "we win, they lose." That was how Reagan "negotiated" with Gorbachev.

Yes, Reagan talked with Gorbachev. But he resisted the Soviet advance from Nicaragua to Grenada to Afghanistan. He put Pershing missiles in Europe. He launched the Strategic Defense Initiative and said "nyet" when Gorbachev wanted us to deal it away. When Reagan said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," the end of the Cold War already was a fait accompli.

Would Obama have done or said any of this?

Obama wants to talk with Iran. But the question he refuses to answer is what he'd tell Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama dislikes being called an appeaser. But would he say to Iran: No deal unless you disown and disarm Hezbollah? We doubt it. More likely he'd sacrifice a country such as Lebanon to Tehran's ambitions in a modern-day Munich.

When you consider his views the threat posed by Iran, his desire to meet with its leader (who remains pledged to Israel's destruction), and his advisor's desire for Israel's disarmament, it becomes unmistakably clear that Barack Obama is running for Jimmy Carter's second term.