Next time you feel disenfranchised by the State Dept's attitudes, remember this...

The world is dissatisfied with American leadership - Richard Armitage (the guy who revealed Valerie Plame and got away with it) Comment for the Asia Times

It may be too late to convince the world to like the United States. But America's use of "smart power" could be a timely answer to the neo-conservative foreign policy train wreck that has made the US globally unpopular. It's about balancing coercion with attraction, abandoning the September 11 mindset, and investing in the global good. - Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye

Translation for the uninitiated....time to give up the idea that democracies and real republics which guarantee individual rights are a valuable and desirable goal worth striving for as national political aims

Stop getting mad, America. Get smart
By Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye

The world is dissatisfied with American leadership. Shocked and frightened after September 11, 2001, we put forward an angry face to the globe, not one that reflected the more traditional American values of hope and optimism, tolerance and opportunity.

This is another way of saying...GET OVER IT, AMERICA

This fearful approach has hurt the United States' ability to bring allies to its cause, but it is not too late to change. The nation should embrace a smarter strategy that blends our "hard" and "soft" power - our ability to attract and persuade, as well as our ability to use economic and military might.

Lest anyone think that this approach is weak or naive, remember that Defense Secretary Robert Gates used a major speech on November 26 "to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use 'soft' power and for better integrating it with 'hard' power".

Mr. Gates as documented in hard facts elsewhere in this blog has for years made plain he believes in engagment with our enemies, exactly that same policy which many, when voiced by Mr. Obama, have called NAIVE. In short, he like Jim Baker and many others believes that striving to create democracies in a world filled with Palestinian Authorities, Muammar Qadaffis, Saddam Husseins, Hugo Chavez's et al, is quixotic and stupid. Rather, we should give the some or all of what they want, as reasonable mature men and women should do, and avoid useless, profitless, and tasteless loss of life.

BAD AMERICA, BAD

Since September 11, the war on terrorism has shaped this isolating outlook, becoming the central focus of US engagement with the world.....neither can we remain stuck in a narrow post-September 11 mindset that alienates much of the world.

HEY, - 'GET OVER IT, AMERICA'

Clearly, upon reading the words of the state dept's leaders and long time hands, it is easy to see why their world view, warped by years of association with the Hussein's of the world is capable only of enraging an american population they have estranged themselves from

This is not the dwellers in the permanent govt abandoning Israel,
that is a corollary effect,
this is the mindset of these cretins abandoning what makes America, AMERICA.

Slink away into silent retirement and trouble us no more. Something is terribly wrong not just with you two, who have left his nation's highest aspirations as unreachable ideals not worth pursuing as realists, but with the system which has elevated such misbegotten cynical ideas as ideals.