Barack Obama’s Asia trip has come in for some scathing criticism from the right, but no one has been as scathing as Leslie Gelb, former New York Times reporter and former President of the Council on Foreign Relations, in this article in the Daily Beast. Scorcharino! “Amateur hour at the White House” is the headline, and here is a far from atypical excerpt: “Obama’s travels were a chance to settle or make concrete progress on thorny issues like greenhouse-gas emissions, and the fate of U.S. bases on Okinawa, which the Japanese government insists on moving. It was time to announce ways to gain fixes on the U.S.-South Korean trade treaty, long stalled in Congress. It was a moment to show that Beijing would actually make some mutually beneficial compromises on exchange rates or economic sanctions against Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. Absent guarantees of progress on issues such as these, Mr. Obama should have taken a well-deserved vacation in Hawaii.”
This is scathing stuff, and the only word in the excerpt that doesn’t have the ring of sincerity, given what has come before, is “well.”
