Home
By Peter Foster6:00AM BST 01 Sep 2014
Nato members can expect little help from the increasingly diminished occupant of the White House – so who is going to stop aggression by Putin and the Islamic State?
Even by the standards of the Obama administration, it came as a moment of profound anti-climax. After days of breathless briefings that Barack Obama was preparing with international allies to take the fight to the Islamic State (Isil) jihadists in Syria, the president stepped forward to a White House microphone last Friday to announce that…um… well, that was not exactly true.
Indeed, far from it. “We don’t have a strategy yet,” Mr Obama admitted, puncturing at a stroke those rising expectations, inflated by his own officials, that the US was about to go on the offensive. If anyone was harbouring the impression that, after six years of retrenchment, events on the ground in Iraq were going to force America to re-engage with the world, Mr Obama was at pains to dispel it.
This Thursday, when the president arrives at the Nato summit in Wales – via a stop-off in Estonia to pay lip service to the three Baltic states who have been nervously protesting at Vladimir Putin’s unchecked advances in the Ukraine – Mr Obama will certainly not be rushing to reassure Europe that America is suddenly back as the world’s policeman.
On the contrary, he will point to Europe’s desultory failure to meet the basic Nato spending commitment of 2 per cent of GDP, and the matching lack of political will to confront the threat posed by Mr Putin’s adventurism. Thus will he answer those who have questioned the absence of American leadership in the world.
The truth is that America – both its president and its war-weary public – has little interest in helping those who would not first help themselves. Mr Obama bristles at international complaints about American absenteeism, and much of the US agrees with him.
Rest: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/11066951/Barack-Obama-on-Iraq-and-Ukraine-President-Dolittle-comes-back-empty-handed.html