OH DEAR, WHAT'S A MULTICULTURAL PRESIDENT TO DO? - AT 9:02 A.M. ET:  It's becoming clear that many foreign observers, especially in allied countries, are catching on to Barack Obama.  What they see, a number of them don't like.  The discontent is centered in Britain, but it's spreading. 

President Bush brought India, the world's largest democracy, closer to the United States than it's ever been.  But get this, from the New Delhi newspaper, The Pioneer:

He may not relish the comparison but it is now becoming increasingly obvious that Mr Barack Obama is the most hostile American President for India since Richard Nixon. In the eight months he has been in office, Mr Obama has snubbed India more than once. He has sent repeated signals that New Delhi is not integral to his Asian security architecture. Partly as a result of his country’s economic crisis, he has bent over backwards to accommodate China. His open advocacy of protectionism has been most visibly targeted at outsourcing of technology jobs to India. He headlined anti-trade legislation by saying it would punish those who created jobs in Bangalore rather than Buffalo, a special mention that was extraordinarily impolitic and did not go unnoticed in India.

Gee, but he makes such good speeches.

This past week, the Obama team reversed a decade of American nuclear pragmatism and went back to an outdated non-proliferation agenda that should have died, really, in the 1990s. Once more, India has been asked to give up its nuclear weapons and sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a second-tier power. Most alarmingly, Mr Obama has swung wildly on Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak). At various points his diplomats and Generals have said different things. Yet, in all this the overarching political message has been missing.

COMMENT:  Oh, they're so spoiled.  Why can't these Indians praise Obama the way Hugo Chavez did?  We must be stern with these allies left over from the BUSH (!!) days.  If we don't, they'll get the idea that we're on their side.

But the fact is, this is serious.  Obama treats friends like enemies, and enemies like friends.  The reason, of course, is that he doesn't much like our friends, just as he doesn't much like his own country.  As for enemies, why, they're just misunderstood victims of our Cold War mentality.

September 28, 2009