OBAMA’S INDIFFERENCE TO DEMOCRACY
THE WALL STREET JOURNALNotable & Quotable: Obama’s Indifference to Democracy
Historian Andrew Roberts: ‘Obama has turned his back on this fundamental duty.’
President Obama in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, April 21. PHOTO: ZUMA PRESSFrom historian Andrew Roberts’s “Barack Obama has turned his back on democracy” for the website CapX, April 22:
Part of the mission and pride and duty of American presidents was to support the right of self-determination for other peoples. Until Barack Obama.
Almost alone amongst US presidents, Obama has turned his back on this fundamental duty, and instead showed peoples who are struggling for sovereignty the superior sneer of the cold, haughty academic that he really is. When the Iranian people protested against the theft of their June 2009 election by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and took to the streets at the cost of around 100 dead and 4,000 arrested—the exact figures will never be known due to government censorship—President Obama merely stated that the difference between Ahmadinejad and the opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi ‘may not be as great as has been advertised’ and ordered American diplomats to do nothing to support Iranian pro-democracy campaigners.
Similarly, during the Arab Spring, the Libyan Uprising, the annexation of the Crimea, the Syrian civil war, and the Ukrainian insurgency, Obama has in each case carefully identified the pro-democracy forces and then either denied them American support or actively undermined them.
