Please feel free to offer your theories in the comments below.
Obviously, Barack's foreign policy instincts are terrible. He pledged to meet a host of anti-American dictators without preconditions. He sees moral equivalence between the acts of an invading, increasingly totalitarian country (Russia) and those of an invaded, democratic country (Georgia) -- calling on both sides to "show restraint."
But in my view, some time ago, Barack Obama himself signalled what normal Americans would find so repugnant about his conduct of foreign policy: His willingness to take aggression against the US lying down. Remember the South Carolina debate, back in April of 2007? Here's the relevant part of the transcript (emphasis added):
MODERATOR: Senator Obama, if, God forbid a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities have been hit simultaneously by terrorists and we further learned, beyond the shadow of a doubt it had been the work of Al Qaida, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?
Obama: Well, the first thing we'd have to do is make sure that we've got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans.
And I think that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack.
The second thing is to make sure that we've got good intelligence, a., to find out that we don't have other threats and attacks potentially out there, and b., to find out, do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.
But what we can't do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast. Instead, the next thing we would have to do, in addition to talking to the American people, is making sure that we are talking to the international community.
Because as already been stated, we're not going to defeat terrorists on our own. We've got to strengthen our intelligence relationships with them, and they've got to feel a stake in our security by recognizing that we have mutual security interests at stake.
Notice what's missing? Any military defense of the US. The next speaker, John Edwards, promised to "act swiftly and strongly to hold [the perpetrators] responsible . . ." Hillary Clintonn said "I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate."
But nothing of the kind from Barack; he's off talking about natural disasters. As Sarah Palin might put it, you betcha "it won't be apparent" that Obama/Biden is right if their response to aggression against America is . . . nothing.