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The full story from the LA Times (yes, the LA Times!!) is here.

For about a year now, I’ve been hearing that American isn’t respected around the world anymore; that with the election of Obama all that would change.

Well, you can imagine my shock (and awe!) over this rather B–*ch slap all the way from India. While “Rome Burns” all around us (meaning that that great leader and commander in chief can’t make any decision(s) on Afganistan, etc. – he’s off to Denmark to save the Olympics for Chicago) the rest of the world is actually watching. Appalled!

The whole article is here:

The Pioneer > Online Edition : >> Nightmare presidency

But I love this line from the article: There has been a remarkable absence of clarity on Mr Obama’s strategic goals. In the early months, it was easy to pretend he was making up his mind. Now, it would seem he has no mind.

Nightmare presidency

The Pioneer Edit Desk

Obama is ruining India’s security climate

He may not relish the comparison but it is now becoming increasingly obvious that Mr Barack Obama is the most hostile American President for India since Richard Nixon. In the eight months he has been in office, Mr Obama has snubbed India more than once. He has sent repeated signals that New Delhi is not integral to his Asian security architecture. Partly as a result of his country’s economic crisis, he has bent over backwards to accommodate China. His open advocacy of protectionism has been most visibly targeted at outsourcing of technology jobs to India. He headlined anti-trade legislation by saying it would punish those who created jobs in Bangalore rather than Buffalo, a special mention that was extraordinarily impolitic and did not go unnoticed in India. In contrast, the tariff war against Chinese tyres has not been posited in such stark bilateral terms. This past week, the Obama team reversed a decade of American nuclear pragmatism and went back to an outdated non-proliferation agenda that should have died, really, in the 1990s. Once more, India has been asked to give up its nuclear weapons and sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a second-tier power. Most alarmingly, Mr Obama has swung wildly on Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak). At various points his diplomats and Generals have said different things. Yet, in all this the overarching political message has been missing.