{"id":38164,"date":"2013-10-28T10:14:26","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T14:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=38164"},"modified":"2013-10-28T10:14:26","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T14:14:26","slug":"foreign-policy-is-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=38164","title":{"rendered":"Foreign policy is hard"},"content":{"rendered":"

I remember in the early half of the last decade, we heard the screaming from the Left that President Bush had spent our foreign policy capital with the Iraq War – that no one respected us anymore. We were perceived as bullies on the world stage. The I heard during the 2008 campaign that a president Obama would fix all of that – they even nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize before the inauguration because everyone on that side of the political spectrum had great expectations of the new, young President. So here we are five years later and how’s that all working out for us? From the Associated Press<\/a>;<\/p>\n

President Barack Obama has defended America’s surveillance dragnet to leaders of Russia, Mexico, Brazil, France and Germany, but the international anger over the disclosures shows no signs of abating in the short run.<\/p>\n

Longer term, the revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about NSA tactics that allegedly include tapping the cellphones of as many as 35 world leaders threaten to undermine U.S. foreign policy in a range of areas.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

“The magnitude of the eavesdropping is what shocked us,” former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in a radio interview. “Let’s be honest, we eavesdrop too. Everyone is listening to everyone else. But we don’t have the same means as the United States, which makes us jealous.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“The magnitude” hasn’t been fully exposed yet. Just today, someone has released the bombshell that the NSA recorded 50 million phone calls in Spain<\/a>. I’m sure there’s some really interesting shit in that. Why would they even do something like that? I spent 7 days in Spain once and I was bored most of the time – the whole country seemed more interested in taking their siesta than anything else – well, except partying.<\/p>\n

You all know how I feel about little Eddie Snowden, but this isn’t his fault – it’s the fault of the people who thought this was a good idea. The AP article goes on to lament how this makes John Kerry’s job harder, this administration is reaping what they sowed. They’ve been half-assing every policy this country ever had. If Bush squandered our foreign policy capital with Iraq, then what about Obama squandering the foreign policy capital with which he came into office? The world was his oyster, he was everyone’s huckleberry, and look how far we’ve fallen in just five short years. We’re the world’s punchline. We can record 50 million phone calls in one month in Spain, but we can’t launch a website. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I remember in the early half of the last decade, we heard the screaming from the … Foreign policy is hard<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}