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President Obama’s decision to endorse same-sex marriages (and not just civil unions) gave the American presidential race a new twist, presenting a serious challenge to Mr Obama’s likeliest adversary… the GOP’s “presumptive candidate” Mitt Romney. Mikhail Delyagin, the head of the Moscow-based Institute for the Problems of Globalisation (IPROG), commented, “I think everything will depend on the reaction of Romney and the GOP at large to this move, which looks like a provocation from Obama’s side. Obama knows that the majority of people wouldn’t approve of a same-sex marriage for their children, but at the same time, he knows that radical homophobia can scare quite normal people. So, his bet is that the attacks against this move of his from the side of Mr Romney will be so monstrous, that they’d ultimately scare centrist voters away from Romney and the GOP”.
This is indeed a risky bet, since a lot of analysts believe that centrist voters, quite on the contrary, could now tilt away from Obama. In the opinion of these experts, keeping the status quo would be a better solution for Obama, since liberal people wouldn’t vote for Romney anyway, and Obama’s already won moderate supporters of new lifestyles by his decision to end the ban on open gays in the military. So, everything depends on Romney’s reaction now… will he be subtle enough to find a non-aggressive, non-divisive use for the chink in Obama’s armour that the president deliberately left open for him? Romney’s handling of this election’s foreign policy agenda, more important from a Russian point of view, doesn’t speak in favour of the former Massachusetts governor. It appears that Romney’s penchant for aggressive non-apologetic rhetoric may indeed do him a disservice… and not for the first time.
Certainly, his statement to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about Russia as America’s “number one geopolitical foe” in March didn’t help Mr Romney’s record for subtlety. Many observers, including some in Russia, dismissed Mr Romney’s statement as election posturing, advising the Russian public not to take it seriously. Indeed, the phrase about Russia’s “fighting every cause for the world’s worst actors” doesn’t stand up to any kind of criticism, even if a critic sticks to the official American ideology. Even a New York Times editorial had to concede that Russia’s aid to the American-led coalition in Afghanistan and Russia’s abstention during a vote on an anti-Ghaddafi UN resolution don’t fit Mr Romney’s theory. However, was it really just electoral posturing?
If indeed it was, then why did Romney refuse to retract any of the outlandish accusations against Russia and Obama that he made in his interview to CNN? Why instead did he prefer to write a whole article for Foreign Policy magazine, where he complained about president Medvedev’s “attacks” against him (as if the president of a country declared the “number one geopolitical foe” of the world’s biggest nuclear power should find nothing but praise for the author of such a declaration)? Why then did Romney continue the same rhetoric about “pliant” Obama trying to “ingratiate” himself with the Kremlin? Why weren’t any of Romney’s foreign policy advisers, mostly Bush-era neocons, fired? There were lots of opportunities to limit the damage, but Romney never used any of them. No Apology: The Case for American Greatness… that seems to be not just a name for Mr Romney’s paperback, but his ideology in a nutshell.
For a wider world, the choice of America’s geopolitical friends and foes is certainly a more important issue than the intricacies of differences between same-sex marriages and same-sex unions. Nevertheless, there are situations when such seemingly abstract issues can decide the world’s destiny. Sergei Rogov, the head of the RAN Institute of the USA and Canada, warned, “If indeed Romney and his people come to power, the foreign policy team of George Bush Jr would look like children in comparison”. Everyone knows what Bush’s team managed to “achieve” in a relatively short period. Nicole Bacharan, a French author of a book on American elections, noted that in this situation, paradoxically, Romney’s duplicity may serve the world, saying in a recent comment for the Paris-based Le Figaro, “When elected the governor of the state of Massachusetts, Romney introduced a health insurance system on the state level, which ran against the Republican rhetoric and which became a model for Obama’s health care reform in 2011… something that Romney now denies”. Bacharan wrote that there’s always been a wide gap between Romney’s statements and his actual policies. I hope that, indeed, Romney didn’t mean what he said when he spoke about Russia’s “hostility” or the need to support Israel’s possible strike against Iran. However, the world’s security is probably too serious a matter to be made dependent on one person’s duplicity.
10 May 2012
Dmitri Babich
Voice of Russia World Service
http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_05_10/74323977/
Editor’s Note:
Let’s keep it simple. Most of the opposition to President Obama comes from two sources:
NOTHING that Mr Obama says on ANYTHING will ever change their minds. The bubbas hate him because he’s black. The greedsters hate him for standing in their way… they truly enjoy smashing their boot-heels into the faces of helpless people… “The race goes to the swiftest” and “Nothing should impede the market”, dontcha know! Reflect on this… these two groups call themselves “Christian”… it goes a long way to explain the antipathy of normal average Americans to “Born Agains”, doesn’t it?
BMD
US Congress to Consider Lifting Jackson-Vanik Amendment Next Week
Tags: Barack Obama, Chief Rabbi of Russia, Democratic Party, Democratic Party (United States), foreign trade, GIUK Gap, humanitarian intervention, Jackson-Vanik, Jackson-Vanik Amendment, Jews, Jews in Russia, neocon, neoconservatism, Permanent normal trade relations, PNTR, political commentary, politics, Republican, Republican Party (United States), right-wing, Russia, Russian, Russian history, Soviet Jews, Soviet Union, United States, US Congress, US House of Representatives, USA, USSR, Vladimir Putin
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Next week, the US House of Representatives should resume discussions on trade normalisation with Russia. Next Tuesday, a House committee in charge of legislative proposals will hold a working meeting to consider the lifting the notorious Jackson-Vanik Amendment targeting Russia and Moldova. The House has placed a notification of the meeting on the internet. Enacted in 1974, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment made closer trade ties between the USA and the USSR contingent on Soviet Jews’ freedom to emigrate. The amendment remains in force, although it’s regularly waived vis-à-vis Russia since 1989.
Over 500 American companies in the Coalition for US-Russia Trade urged the Congress to ratchet up work on a draft bill to establish permanent trade relations with Russia. Voice of America reported Friday that they submitted a joint letter to US President Barack Obama asking him to cooperate with Congress on eliminating the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The coalition pointed up that as long as the USA dithers on enacting Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR), American business will have to watch foreign competitors snatch the best deals that “will lock in commercial relationships for years to come”.
10 November 2012
Voice of Russia World Service
http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_11_10/US-Congress-to-consider-lifting-Jackson-Vanik-amendment-next-week/
Editor’s Note:
A coalition of neoconservative Republicans and interventionist Democrats block action on getting rid of Jackson-Vanik. In short, Jackson-Vanik remains because of domestic American political concerns, not because of any real force that it may retain. After all, there’s no bar to Jews emigrating since 1989… many of them have returned since then, fancy that. In fact, Rav Lazar, the Chief Rabbi of Russia, went from Brooklyn to Russia in the 90s, and he’s a member of the RF Public Chamber and a member of Putin’s “outer” inner circle (that is, he’s close to VVP, but he’s not one of the siloviki). The situation addressed (badly) by Jackson-Vanik no longer exists… therefore, it should go in the shitcan. Now, if we can do this, we can also shitcan such overly-expensive Cold War relics as NATO and American deployments on the European continent. The Europeans are perfectly capable of their own national defence… but we should continue deployment of American forces in the UK, which is part of the Anglosphere (and part of the American FEBA based on the GIUK Gap and the English Channel). We can’t afford such hegemonic fripperies anyway, can we?
BMD