Self-Induced Demise of the American Superpower

I love Caroline Glick's writing, and she's in peak form in her new essay, "Surviving in a Post-American World":

Like it or not, the United States of America is no longer the world's policeman. This was the message of Barack Obama's presidential journey to Britain, France, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Iraq this past week.

Somewhere between apologizing for American history - both distant and recent; genuflecting before the unelected, bigoted king of Saudi Arabia; announcing that he will slash the US's nuclear arsenal, scrap much of America's missile defense programs and emasculate the US Navy; leaving Japan to face North Korea and China alone; telling the Czechs, Poles and their fellow former Soviet colonies, "Don't worry, be happy," as he leaves them to Moscow's tender mercies; humiliating Iraq's leaders while kowtowing to Iran; preparing for an open confrontation with Israel; and thanking Islam for its great contribution to American history, President Obama made clear to the world's aggressors that America will not be confronting them for the foreseeable future.

Whether they are aggressors like Russia, proliferators like North Korea, terror exporters like nuclear-armed Pakistan or would-be genocidal-terror-supporting nuclear states like Iran, today, under the new administration, none of them has any reason to fear Washington.

This news is music to the ears of the American Left and their friends in Europe. Obama's supporters like billionaire George Soros couldn't be more excited at the self-induced demise of the American superpower. CNN's former (anti-)Israel bureau chief Walter Rodgers wrote ecstatically in the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday, "America's... superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy."

Read the entire essay. The "superpower downgrading" is more a function of this particular administration than America's structural power profile.

I'll be glad when Obama's gone, in any case.

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UPDATE: Glick's piece is now up at the Jerusalem Post (via Memeorandum), and Dr. Sanity's got an entry on it, "The 'O' Team: Obama's Emasculation of America."

But get this, movie director Ron Howard, who has made a few fairly patriotic - if not masculine - films, is calling for an America that is a "less preeminent superpower," not driven by a "sort of militarism and this need to export, you know, democracy ..." See Newsbusters, "Ron Howard Yearns for Less Powerful America Not 'Driven by Militarism'."