The NYT presents the news as a major breakthrough for the Obama Administration, but every despot in the world would love to have one-on-one talks with the USA. It elevates them as co-equals to the United States.
Obama handed this win to Ahmadinejad on a bloody platter.
Let us not forget: Russia and China keep running interference for Iran at the UN. The P5+1 Talks where Iran needed to answer to world powers and it s neighbors collapsed because Iran declined to cooperate. So to save face, the US offered to Iran a thing that Kim Jong Ill from North Korea wanted for years: Direct Talks with the USA as if Iran is the power house that the USSR was thirty years ago.
I am not going into the political mess that this is for the President at home. Was it not Bush would “went at it alone” all around the world? Now Obama is going alone! Bush held a coalition in Iraq and Afghanistan and held his own in the six party talks with North Korea while getting out of the UN any resolution he wanted. But now Hillary Clinton’s efforts to contain Iran are so dismal that he USA gave-in to Iran’s games and is offering now up one-on-one talks.
Yes, I do believe the USA has a lead role around the globe, but that means having the power and influence to make sure that world powers work together; it is to make sure that we and the free world – not an out-of-control dictator – sets the demands of how world policy should work.
