We already noted [11]that it has been a bad 24 hours for US foreign policy, when hours after the US blamed Russia of targeting civilians, it was the US itself which bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, killing 9 Doctors without Borders staffers, 3 children and other innocent bystanders.
The president got the brunt of it during yesterday's press conference, when he got a very targeted question from Reuters' White House reporter Julia Edwards who asked Obama point blank "how do you respond to critics who say Putin is outsmarting you, that he took a measure of you in Ukraine and he felt he could get away with it?"
The exchange can be seen 41:30 into the clip below:
Obama's meandering response: [12]
Yes, I’ve heard it all before. (Laughter.) I’ve got to say I’m always struck by the degree to which not just critics but I think people buy this narrative.
Let’s think about this. So when I came into office seven and a half years ago, America had precipitated the worst financial crisis in history, dragged the entire world into a massive recession. We were involved in two wars with almost no coalition support. U.S. -- world opinion about the United States was at a nadir -- we were just barely above Russia at that time, and I think potentially slightly below China’s. And we were shedding 800,000 jobs a month, and so on and so forth.
And today, we're the strongest large advanced economy in the world -- probably one of the few bright spots in the world economy. Our approval ratings have gone up. We are more active on more international issues and forge international responses to everything from Ebola to countering ISIL.
Meanwhile, Mr. Putin comes into office at a time when the economy had been growing and they were trying to pivot to a more diversified economy, and as a consequence of these brilliant moves, their economy is contracting 4 percent this year. They are isolated in the world community, subject to sanctions that are not just applied by us but by what used to be some of their closest trading partners. Their main allies in the Middle East were Libya and Syria -- Mr. Gaddafi and Mr. Assad -- and those countries are falling apart. And he’s now just had to send in troops and aircraft in order to prop up this regime, at the risk of alienating the entire Sunni world.
So what was the question again? (Laughter.)
Laughter indeed, but yes: Obama really needed a reminder what the question was as he completely failed to answer it. He did try to pivot back modestly toward the end of the near-800 word response saying the following...
we’re not going to make Syria into a proxy war between the United States and Russia. That would be bad strategy on our part. This is a battle between Russia, Iran, and Assad against the overwhelming majority of the Syrian people. Our battle is with ISIL, and our battle is with the entire international community to resolve the conflict in a way that can end the bloodshed and end the refugee crisis, and allow people to be at home, work, grow food, shelter their children, send those kids to school. That’s the side we’re on.
This is not some superpower chessboard contest. And anybody who frames it in that way isn’t paying very close attention to what’s been happening on the chessboard.
... actually a superpower chessboard contest is precisely what this is, and while Obama can argue whether or not Putin is outsmarting him, someone else on the global chessboard is smelling blood. That someone is China, and this time China, which as we profiled before is aligning itself not with the US but with Russia [13]in the Syria proxy war - because that's precisely what it is - targeted not the US foreign policy failures, but Obama's domestic problems, namely the "routine" series of mass shootings taking place in the US which according to an Op-Ed in China's premier media outlet, Xinhia, "exposes failure of US politics."
Here is the full Op-Ed posted by Xinhua's editors [14]:
Obama's "routine" on mass shooting exposes failure of U.S. politics
The Americans were startled once again when tragic news break out about the deadly campus shooting in Oregon on Thursday.
However, the United States is "the only advanced country on earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months," just like President Barack Obama has painfully acknowledged.
Obama, angry and frustrated, criticized that the nation's response to mass shootings has become "routine," from press coverage, to his own comments, to the fruitless debate over gun control.
It is obvious that the country has grown "numb" to mass shootings like Thursday's incident in Oregon, where a 20-year-old gunman killed at least nine people at a community college.
There have been 296 shootings so far this year in the United States, claiming more than 370 innocent lives, and it was the 15th time Obama has pleaded for gun control legislation since taking office in 2009.
How come a country as powerful as the United States has been unable to stop this kind of brutal attacks against innocent civilians?
The problem is deeply rooted in the country's political system, where bipartisan politics and interest groups exert huge influence, to the point that security of the American people have to give way to political correctness and corporate interests.
Opinion polls have repeatedly shown that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor stricter gun control rules, yet no legislation on that front can be expected in the near future.
Even the Newtown massacre in 2012 that killed 20 children and six adults failed to break the impasse in Washington over gun control.
The biggest surprise to the world in the wake of Oregon shooting is that there was no surprise for such cold-blooded murders to happen again and again in the United States.
Defects in the U.S. political system have not only caused inaction, but also panic that alarmed the world, as an imminent government shutdown resulting from political wrestle on the Capitol Hill last month posed danger to both the U.S. economy and the world market.
The recurrent mass shootings in the United States deserve real reflection and pondering, since those innocent lives cannot be lost in vain.
Yes, China - that paragon of human rights - is openly mocking the US for its own domestic policy failings. Because in the grand chessgame which Obama refuses to acknowledge, it is not so much what China says, but that it says it in the first place - something which confirms the elephant in the room, and yet which few are willing to discuss: US standing in the international arena, especially through the lens of the "other" superpowers, has rarely sunk this low.
And if Obama's "non-chess" competitors don't respect him, how can the US president hope to impose the national interests of those whose interests he truly represents - as even China openly points out - namely US corporations and Wall Street companies, on the global arena?
