When it comes to President Obama’s mystifying response to the Ebola threat—including a refusal to ban entry into the U.S. from affected countries—I only say this: he told us so. In Berlin in 2008, Barack Obama assured us that he was “a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.”
Stop right there, mes amis. I don’t think this was just the blather of a pampered and delusional adolescent (though it was that, too).
What does it mean that POTUS views himself as a citoyen of the world? I think we are seeing the answer to this question in President Obama’s response to Ebola (and I write this as a citoyen who is not particularly expecting an Ebola plague in the U.S., but who is fascinated by seemingly peculiar direction of the president’s response). Of the president's non-actions on the Ebola front, Thomas Sowell writes:
There was a time when an outbreak of a deadly disease overseas would bring virtually unanimous agreement that our top priority should be to keep it overseas. Yet Barack Obama has refused to bar entry to the United States by people from countries where the Ebola epidemic rages, as Britain has done.
The reason? Refusing to let people with Ebola enter the United States would conflict with the goal of fighting the disease. In other words, the safety of the American people takes second place to the goal of helping people overseas.
As if to emphasize his priorities, President Obama has ordered thousands of American troops to go into Ebola-stricken Liberia, disregarding the dangers to those troops and to other Americans when the troops return.
I don’t want to engage in hysteria about Ebola, but I can’t forbear patting myself on the back because I have been thinking (though with far less eloquent words!) along the same lines of what the great Sowell is saying is the reason for the president's refusal to halt entry of people from affected countries:
At a minimum, [the president’s response to Ebola] suggests that he takes his conception of himself as a citizen of the world more seriously than he takes his role as President of the United States. At worst, he may consider Americans’ interests expendable in the grand scheme of things internationally. If so, this would explain a lot of his foreign policy disasters around the world, which seem inexplicable otherwise.
Those critics who have been citing Barack Obama’s foreign policy fiascoes and disasters as evidence that he is incompetent may be overlooking the possibility that he has different priorities than the protection of the American people and America’s interests as a nation.
I hesitated to quote this because I don’t want to get within a million miles of anybody who questions President Obama’s U.S. citizenship. That is stupid. But he told us himself that he has dual citizenship. He is a proud citizen of the United States and of the world. He is as loyal to the concept of the world as he is to the U.S.–or so it seems, with his response to Ebola.
Many intellectuals embrace the kind of internationalism at which President Obama hinted in Berlin. They would regard people who want an American president to look out for the United States first and foremost as parochial. But an explicit debate between the international vs. the parochial view never took place in 2008. Candidate Obama’s glibness carried the day.
But we can’t say he didn’t warn us.