http://www.nationalreview.com/node/424738/print Obama’s Hope-and-Change Foreign Policy
President Obama applies the same principles abroad that he does at home.
By Victor Davis Hanson — September 29, 2015
At home President Obama is well known for his preference for perceived parity over liberty. Most of his domestic agenda — Obamacare, executive-order amnesties, open borders, near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, the piling up of $9 trillion in new debt, tax hikes, more regulations — is apparently aimed at shifting power and capital away from the upper middle class to the lower classes.
From Obama’s first appearance on the national scene, his rhetoric has been directed against those whom he perceives as the inordinately privileged — much more the supposedly uncouth upper middle class than the tasteful Martha’s Vineyard Wall Streeters or the jeans-and-T-shirt Malibu super-rich.
Americans who did not favor his redistributionist vision were rhetorically reduced to clingers, nativists, the privileged unwilling to spread their wealth, leaches on government who didn’t build their own businesses and who didn’t realize they had already made enough money. Obama once suggested that he was for higher capital-gains taxes even if such tax hikes would discourage profitable activity and thus lead to lower revenues for the Treasury, simply for the sake of “fairness” — reminding us of Tocqueville’s various warnings that many people would prefer parity even if meant less liberty and wealth for themselves.
Obama sees the rest of the world as he does the United States — and thus in need of a redistribution in power that will bring greater fairness to the planet. Accordingly, under current U.S. foreign policy, the desire for supposed equality trumps most considerations of human rights, values, consensual government, and our own national interest.
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