MAIL ONLINE – BLOG: Now that President Obama has done enough back-room deals to get the Democrats' health care legislation through the House of Representatives, he can resume making plans for a visit to his childhood home, Indonesia. The trip was on for this week, but the White House cancelled it so Obama could stay in Washington to push through the Bill.
Once he lands at Jakarta, capital of the world's largest Muslim state, he probably won't make the same mistake he made a few years ago in Kenya, when he let himself be photographed wearing a turban. Still, he may find it hard to resist the urge to go native.
One of the reasons a lot of Americans find Obama oddly foreign is that he had an oddly foreign childhood: his formative years were spent in Indonesia. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born there. The rest of Obama's childhood was spent in Honolulu, a Pacific Ocean capital soaked in East Asian culture.
What's this got to do with Britain, or indeed with Europe? Plenty. Obama is the first US president who was raised without cultural or emotional or intellectual ties to either Britain or Europe. The British and the Europeans have been so enchanted with 'America's first black president' that they haven't been able to see what he really is: America's first Third World president.
If you doubt it, remember the kick in the teeth he gave Britain over the Falklands just a few weeks ago. Obama had his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, fly to Buenos Aires to give American support to President Kirchner's call for international negotiations over the Falklands. Amazing. What was more amazing is that all we've heard out of Number 10 and the Foreign Office since then is that it doesn't mean anything.
Oh, yes it does, and Washington insiders know it does.
I've just been in touch with Dr James Lucier, a former US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff Director, about all this. He tells me: 'Culturally, Obama detests Great Britain. He sent the bust of Churchill back without a fig leaf of an excuse. He insulted the Queen and the Prime Minister, giving them ridiculous gifts.' At one point, 'he refused to meet the prime minister.'
Here is what is happening, though the British Government seems oblivious of it. The Obama administration is ready to dump the Old World in pursuit of the One World.
Britain is being dumped. The special relationship, whatever is left of it, is over. Britain losing control of the Falklands to Argentina would just be collateral damage.
But France is being dumped, too. Obama's ostentatious refusal to have dinner with President Sarkozy during his visit to France last year was no accident. Rather than meet the French president, Obama went off to a restaurant with his wife Michelle.
Germany is being dumped. Obama has been little more than dismissive of Chancellor Merkel. Russia in turn will be waved aside.
Most spectacularly of all, the European Union has now been comprehensively dumped. The American president has refused to attend what is supposed to be a US-EU Madrid summit in May.
What we have shaping up, but what the British Government doesn't yet grasp, is that Obama has a conscious policy of down-grading America's relationship with, first, Britain and then with the rest of Europe.
He believes that the US -- yes, his own country -- and Britain, and the leading European countries, too, for that matter, are imperial powers who ruthlessly exploited the Third World for their own profit.
And Obama is America's first Third World president. Read on and comment >>> Mary Ellen Synon | Monday, March 22, 2010
