Obama Doctrine: Undermining our friends, emboldening our enemies and diminishing our country......

'Reset' Translates as 'Capitulation'

by Frank Gaffney at TownHall.com

Last March, during a visit to Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was made to look foolish when she presented her host, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, with a box festooned with a button marked "Reset" in English. The idea was to have a photo-op designed to symbolize President Obama's ambition to put U.S. relations with the Kremlin on a new, more positive footing after the bilateral strains of the George W. Bush years.........

Today, however, President Obama pulled the plug on the Bush Third Site. Although he professed an abiding commitment to the security of Poland and the Czech Republic and pledged "a new missile defense architecture in Europe will provide stronger, smarter, and swifter defenses of American forces and America's allies," no one should be under any illusion: With his capitulation to Russia, Barack Obama has just affirmed what I call the Obama Doctrine: Undermining our friends, emboldening our enemies and diminishing our country.........

The true nature of that political decision is also clear: Team Obama believes that by cancelling missile defenses we absolutely will need in the future and leaving our allies in the lurch, the United States will secure assistance from the Russians in minimizing the Iranian threat. There is, sadly, no reason to believe that such help will be forthcoming.

To the contrary, all the evidence suggests otherwise: Vladimir Putin is enabling that Iranian threat, with nuclear technology, anti-aircraft defenses and political protection against any effective international sanctions on Tehran. Worse yet, he has now been rewarded for such behavior by an act of naked appeasement with respect to the Third Site.

These strategically tectonic shifts will have far-reaching, if not entirely predictable, consequences. The U.S. deployment of additional sea-based defenses and ultimately the placing more ashore somewhere may help mitigate some of the near-term missile threats Iran is now posing to our allies and forces in the Mideast. But it is a safe bet that they will not begin to offset the damage that the Obama administration has done to our own security and to our relations with key allies worldwide by resetting" relations with Russia in a manner that amounts to rank capitulation.

Read the whole article at TownHall.com........