“Speak softly and carry a big stick” -- Theodore Roosevelt

This seems to sum up President Obama’s foreign policy. Apparently, he believes/hopes that by speaking softly he will bring more nations together to oppose those who threaten the world. So far we have repeatedly heard him speaking softly (Cairo comes to mind), but we have yet to see any evidence that he is carrying that big stick. 

Of course, all US presidents have a “big stick” at their disposal, the US military. But, having a big stick in the closet is different than carrying it. When you take it out of the closet and walk with it on your shoulder, there is at a minimum the implication that you are prepared to use the stick.

Foreign policy, like almost everything else, really comes down to personal relationships -- how the leader of one nation perceives the leader of another. Neville Chamberlain was seen as weak – Hitler attacked. Nikita Khrushchev thought JFK was young, inexperienced and weak – the Cuban missile crisis. Saddam Hussein thought George Bush was bluffing – the Iraq War.

History is littered with corpses of people who paid the price for the perception that their leader was unwilling to use the big stick. We can only pray that speaking softly will carry the day.

So you objected to the U.S. acting alone on international matters, you wanted America to work in a multi-nation coalition.

Now is the time for your multi-nation diplomacy to pay off.

France has a navy (# 3 worldwide), so do Russia (#4), China (#5), Germany (#7) and Italy (#8).

How about using some of that multi-national magic to get some of those navies to stop, board and inspect ships coming out of North Korea?

President Clinton thought we were fighting law breakers, so he tried treating terrorists as criminals. After the USA was attached on 9-11, President Bush understood we were at war. President Obama apparently thinks we are being picked on by a school bully: “North Korea broke the rules once again”. So he did what any teacher would do, he called the principal, in this case the Secretary General of the UN. President Obama wants North Korea to be made to write on the blackboard 1,000 times “We will not launch missiles.” The sad part is that the UN cannot even agree to have them do that.

So what does President Obama do when the UN finally sends a note home to Pyongyang, “Please know that little Kim Jong II has been behaving badly in the world and we would like him to stop. Thank you.” No doubt President Obama will proclaim the United States is safer because we worked with the international community to handle this crisis.