Liberals with a Singular Focus are the Best

Sometimes you find a few unbroken eggs in a muddy pasture.  That appears to be the case in the following article by Gareth Evans.  He is a former Australian foreign minister who co-chaired the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation.  Essentially, he's one of those guys that thinks every country should just get rid of all their nuclear weapons and live happily ever after. 

Ok..fair enough.  I'll get to that fantasyland thinking in a moment.  Instead, check out how he starts off his article.

U.S. President Barack Obama's foreign-policy landscape is littered with deflated balloons. Soaring speeches, high hopes and great expectations have yielded minimal returns.

Across the Islamic world - from North Africa to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan - we see fragile relationships, unhappy transitions, unresolved conflicts and outright attacks on the United States, despite Obama's case for a new beginning, movingly articulated in his June 2009 speech in Cairo. Israel, deaf to Obama's urging, is further from reconciliation with Palestine and closer to war with Iran than it has ever been.

Likewise, for all the effort put into improving America's most important bilateral relationships - those with China and Russia - ties with both countries have become increasingly tense, owing most recently to the Kremlin's intransigence over Syria and official Chinese behavior in the South China Sea.
 

That's pretty much dead on.  You won't see anything like this written in the US media despite the veracity.  In fact, this is an Australian published in the Prague Post while writing from Singapore which is the base for the Asia Pacific Leadership Network.

What I find amusing is that the author is stridently liberal.  Anyone who dreams of a non-nuclear world is hopelessly so.  The genie is never getting back in that bottle.  Only the delusional argue otherwise.   And, despite the liberal tendencies of the author, he is so focused on his singlular task of nuclear non-proliferation he overlooks his absolute evisceration of President Obama's foreign policy endeavors in the process.

What's received little play amoung the US media is that Obama has been dead set on destroying the United States' nuclear arsenal.  He requested that the Pentagon come up with a plan to reduce said arsenal by 80%.  This was a unilateral reduction.  Unfortunately, for President Obama (and Gareth Evans) the US general election got in the way.  You may recall that President Obama informed Medvedev that he'd have more flexibility after the election.  That was at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul.

Now...how do I know that Gareth Evans (despite his take down of Obama) is a liberal.  Simple:

But it is hard to ignore the huge constraint that an intensely partisan and negative political environment in the United States has imposed. Republican intransigence has precluded U.S. ratification of the CTBT, which would be a big international circuit-breaker, almost killed the New START treaty at birth, and has caused the bar for further negotiations with Russia and China to be set almost impossibly high.

Nor is there any sign that any of these positions would be modified should Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger, become president. International concerns have been compounded - certainly for the APLN leaders - by the shrillness of Romney's statements on China and Taiwan, as well as his extraordinary identification of Russia as America's "No. 1 geopolitical foe."
 

Shrillness?  Is that what that was?  I thought it was an actual leader stepping to the plate and putting the Chinese and the Russians on notice that they will not be dictating our foreign policy as they have been for the last four years.