FASCINATING FOREIGN VIEW – AT 8:01 A.M. ET:  Reader Jean Spik alerts us to a column in Germany's Spiegel Online, expressing one foreign view of Obamacare and its impact on America's standing in the world. 

Of course, there is the usual gloating.  The big, bad, behind-the-times United States has finally become at least semi-civilized and turned to its government for health care.  Europe couldn't be more pleased by this affirmation of European superiority, even as Europe, with falling birth rates, troubled economies and massive Muslim immigration, heads toward its own self-destruction.

But then there's the sober second thought.  The writer, Gregor Peter Schmitz, worries that the total focus on Obamacare, the exhaustion in passing it, will damage American foreign policy:

The debate will dominate the next few months -- and will no doubt also have an impact on the other projects that Obama is finally planning to tackle. The attention that the president will have to continue to pay to health care, in fact, makes further successes that much more doubtful.

Every other issue has become a sideshow, particularly those outside the borders of America. The Afghanistan mission: of marginal interest. Protecting the environment: postponed. Peace in the Middle East: off in the distance. Sanctions against Iran: delayed. Europe: not even worth a trip.

The one remaining global superpower has succumbed to navel gazing. The nature of Obama's hard-fought victory means little will change in the near future. On the contrary: Now he must explain to the country and to his own party why the entire health care journey, as all-encompassing as it turned out to be, was worth it in the end. He will have little time for anything else.

Such a realization should not spoil the celebration over health care for the Americans themselves. But the rest of the world won't be joining the party quite so enthusiastically.

COMMENT:  What?  You mean the rest of the world really wants a strong United States to act internationally?  What a strange idea.

I just wonder how many officers in foreign ministries around the globe are privately saying, "You know, that Bush wasn't so bad.  A bit abrasive, with that cowboy style.  But I'm not so sure this Obama can protect us.  What do we do?"

I don't know what the "sophisticates" abroad, especially in the Europe that is not even worth a presidential trip, can do.  They invested so much in a rock star.  Maybe next time they should put their money on a statesman.

March 24, 2010