Oh, Bama fllippancy and foreign policy, according to Senik

A former Bush administration official has an op ed piece posted with RealClearPolitics.Com today.  Senik appears to be a self-confessed Neo-Con; a "school" which I constantly endeavor to separate myself with by a mental brick wall.  Senik is making an insider's comparison to the differences between the Obama Foreign Policy and the Bush Foreign Policy...aside from abysmal actions like the Mexico City Policy...Obama is making vast turnarounds from the goals, advances, and achievements of the last 8+ years.  Below are some of Senik's words.  I'll let you decide the validity of Obama's path v. Bush's path...

the Obama Administration’s attitude towards persecuted dissidents has been flippant [I embolden this to point out that, previously, I identified Obama's politics as 'Pragmatic-Flippancy.'] at best. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Beijing in February, she told her Chinese hosts that “Our pressing on [human rights] issues can't interfere on the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis." Translation: don’t think about standing in front of a tank anytime soon. While America’s economic dependence on China is undeniable given the profligate spending that we have indulged thanks to Beijing’s line of credit, voicing that reality out loud is destined to crush the spirit of the friends of liberty in the Far East. How many Tibetan monks will be able to take inspiration from the Declaration of Independence if they think it truthfully reads “all men are created equal ... but some hold hundreds of billions of dollars in American treasury bonds”?

The usually branding conscious Obama Administration has yet to give a label to their foreign policy. Given where its priorities seem to lie, let’s settle on the “Tyranny Agenda” for now.

The Obama Administration has struttingly declared its fealty to realism, the only foreign policy school of thought so insecure that it seeks validation in its name. Over the past decade, realists have come to define themselves in opposition to “overly idealistic” neoconservatives, but that sells a proud tradition short. Historically, realists have provided a valuable service to the foreign policy community by relying on steely-eyed analysis and a focus on the national interest to cut to the quick of even the most vexing national security issues. But the diluted progeny of those realists past have polluted the legacy of their forebears. Steely-eyed analysis has given way to clammy-handed diplomacy. And the national interest has been supplanted by the least offensive consensus.

Thus, the Obama realists will have none of this dunderheaded democracy talk. Sophisticated nations, after all, thrive by starving the universal hunger for liberty and gorging the bloated enemies of freedom. At least, that’s the only intelligible way to understand President Obama’s foreign policy.

explain a presidential offer to barter away the missile defense of Eastern Europe’s young democracies in exchange for Russian efforts to slow Iran’s development of nuclear weapons? Were Obama’s offer tied to any tangible outcomes it could perhaps be justified on the coldest of realist grounds: between your security and ours, ours comes first. But a promise to talk, even if fulfilled, doesn’t disarm warheads.