It’s safe to say our relations with the British have probably never been worse in our lifetimes. Recall that just before he went to London and bowed to beheaders, the newly inaugurated President Obama let it be known he had returned the bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy. He might as well have tossed it out of the Oval Office into the snow.

Then, he gifted Her Majesty with, what else, recordings of all his speeches. He followed that up with the amazingly thoughtful gesture of bestowing on Prime Minister Gordon Brown a $29.95 collection of DVDs of Hollywood’s greatest films. Mr. Brown is doubtless enjoying them now, in his retirement, if he can get an adapter.

The “Special Relationship” fostered so carefully by the World War II alliance of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt is in tatters. The Obama State Department is happy to tell us that Britain is no more special to us than any of the other 192 countries in the UN. (Of course, President Obama is known to think the U.S. itself is no more exceptional than Britain, or even Greece.)

It was fairly easy to be the new broom sweeping clean – back in 2009. Now, however, as Rev. Wright might say, Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost. Along with his sagging approval numbers is coming increasing disrespect. Rep. Maxine Waters is asking permission from her constituents to take the president to the woodshed. Former backer Peggy Noonan briskly calls him a “loser” on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and asks aloud if he might just be “snakebit.”

The worst example of dissing the commander-in-chief, doubtless came from leftist Bill Maher. He told a nationwide audience, in an obscenity-laced routine, that he had been hoping for a president who would shoot the BP executives after the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

A short review of our Special Relationship might be in order. When Churchill crossed the U-boat infested North Atlantic seventy summers ago in the HMS Prince of Wales, he forged an alliance that lasted through World War II, the Cold War, all the way into the hills of Tora Bora, in Afghanistan and the oilfields of Basra in Iraq. Churchill, it was said in that 1941 First Summit, felt as if he was “going to meet God Almighty.” FDR’s son told the British Prime Minister his father thought him “the greatest man in the world.”

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In order to avoid become a cynic in my old age, I try to apply what I call the Gary Hart Principle to public statements of public figures. That principle is this: Let’s suppose they are telling the truth.

The principle derives from Sen. Gary Hart’s experience back in 1987. He was running for president, you’ll recall, and he dared the reporters to tail him if they doubted his fidelity to his marital vows. They did. Uh-oh. Soon, poor Hart was seen coming out of his Capitol Hill townhouse in the presence of a fetching young lady not his wife.

Not to worry, said the embarrassed senator. He had been up all night discussing U.S.-Soviet relations with this bright young college student. In those days, before Bill Clinton, actually getting caught in such circumstances was not considered job-enhancing.

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President Obama’s just-issued National Security Strategy has, like most heavily nuanced Obama documents, something for everyone.  What is given with one hand is seized by the other, in near-predictable cyclical fashion.

There are stout affirmations of America’s need for a strong defense extensively qualified by even more dogmatic commitments to a new “international order.”  According to the President, we must “(renew) American leadership so that we can more effectively advance our interests in the 21st century” while  “shaping an international order that can meet the challenges of our time.” 

So … is there ever a time when American leadership means standing alone?  Is that not, by definition, what leadership sometimes is?

Mr. Obama says, within two paragraphs, that “military force, at times may be necessary to defend our country” and that “the use of force is sometimes necessary” (emphasis mine).  Maybe, is, could be, sometimes – there might be a certain trumpet in there somewhere, but I have yet to find it.

Mr. Obama then lurches into Wilsonian utopianism: His new “strategy” “reaffirms America’s commitment to pursue our interests through an international system in which all nations have certain rights and responsibilities.”  This rings of Wilson’s infantile Fourteen Points, through which an arrogant American president tried to impose a new international order on a world that didn’t want one. 

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“Two decades after the end of the Cold War, we face a cruel irony of history,” said President Obama today in a major foreign policy address.  “The risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up.”

The President was speaking to the assembled leaders of 47 countries, gathered in Washington, DC to discuss ways of averting nuclear terrorism.  His point is a good one: There’s a lot of nuclear material floating around, and it’s imperative that for the security of the United States and our allies America take the lead in preventing it from falling into the hands of terrorists and evildoers generally.

Yet the President, who said last year in Prague and reaffirmed today that he wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons, seems unmindful of two salient facts:

(1) We cannot dis-invent nuclear weapons.  The technology exists.  It is fairly simple to obtain.  Thus, we will never rid the world of nuclear weapons any more than we will rid the world of sin.  We must therefore remain vigilant, never – ever – relaxing the exhausting, expensive and intensive efforts of our intelligence agencies and armed forces to prevent the spread and use of nuclear devices.

(2) By cutting too deeply into our nuclear arsenal, we invite the very thing we wish to avoid: Nuclear confrontation.  As former UN Ambassador and distinguished security policy expert John Bolton has noted, “President Obama has to date failed to articulate any coherent strategic rationale for the substantial cuts in nuclear weapons and delivery systems he agreed to … with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.”  Instead, Mr. Obama has eliminated the leading-edge F-22 aircraft, limited funds to test our existing nuclear weapons and eliminated the missile defenses both Poland and Czechoslovakia had agreed to host on their soil.

Wishful thinking is no substitute for sound policy.  Although Mr. Obama’s efforts at this week’s conference might be noble, the extent to which they are uninformed by wisdom makes them all the more dangerous for the security and vital interests of the United States.

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We have been told endlessly that we have witnessed an “historic” day at the UN this week. Indeed, we did. It was a day that many of us could be proud of. A nation’s leader stood at the podium before the General Assembly and addressed representatives of 192 nations who are member-states of the United Nations. Here is part of what that leader said:

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday, the president of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

That nation’s leader confronted the delegates to the UN General Assembly with no other weapon than the truth. That is what made this week truly historic. In the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one word of truth can move the world.

As much as I admire that nation’s leader for speaking truth to power, I regret only that it was not my own nation’s leader. Those powerful words were a portion of the speech delivered by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He knows that if Iranian mullahs get an atomic bomb, they could achieve in minutes what Hitler failed to do in years–annihilate the main portion of the Jews. Netanyahu is determined–more determined than the European Union, more determined, apparently, than the current U.S. administration–that Iran will not achieve its goal of nuclear weapons.

The Obama administration has been sending weak and half-hearted signals about the Iranian mullahs’ drive for nuclear weapons. Would the U.S. approve or disapprove if Netanyahu sent Israeli jets to take out Iran’s nuclear sites? I don’t know. I doubt if anyone in or out of this administration knows.

Former Carter National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski raised eyebrows this week by saying the U.S. should be prepared to take strong and forceful measures to prevent a clash in the Mideast–by confronting any Israeli planes seeking to make a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear sites.

“We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?… They have the choice of turning back or not…”

And if they don’t? Are we really talking about shooting down Israeli jets? Are we really prepared to defend the Iranian mullah’s terror regime?

This would certainly represent change, but not in any productive or beneficial way. Seemingly, the U.S. cannot stop the Iranian mullahs from their mad rush to get nuclear weapons, but our current administration is being urged to consider stopping the Israelis from doing it.

Let us hope that Brzezinski is not speaking for the Obama administration. As for the Carter administration, for which he did speak, it should be remembered that more people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America lost their lives and their liberty under the Carter administration than under any U.S. presidency since World War II. Communists made major gains in the face of Carter’s invertebrate leadership. I guess that’s what they give Peace Prizes for.

We’re told that President Obama’s presiding over the UN Security Council is historic. Surely it is. Did he, I wonder, mention the Gulag with its ten million victims? Did he refer at all to China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which claimed ten million lives? Or the killing fields of Cambodia? Or the Rwandan genocide? We are told that the reason this week is historic is because an American President has never before presided over the UN Security Council.

The UN Security Council is powerful, the media informs us. It is important. Really? If the UN Security Council is so powerful, why is it the case that the UN Security Council did nothing about any of the horrors mentioned above? I doubt that the UN Security Council even passed one of its typically toothless resolutions to deplore millions of human deaths. Or, shall we mention the UN Population Fund–which is itself complicit in 50 million forced abortions in China?

Driving to work this week, I spied a 1967 Chevy truck in front of me. It sported Maryland license plates. Above the plate was this word: Historic. Now, there’s an appropriate use of this most overused word. See the USA in your Chevrolet–and have no part in that disgraceful truckling to any general assembly of tin pot despots and ditzy dictators.

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