How Not to Treat Your Allies

Someone asked me today what I meant when I said that President Obama seriously dissed -- insulted -- Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Great Britain. I gave him the nickle recap of the story, but I wish that I had first seen Mark Steyn's article, "The Great Destabilizer," over at National Review Online. He truly gives the story perspective.

In fact, it's a must read. Cutting and pasting will not do it justice, but I will tease you with Steyn's prediction of what will happen to relations with Europe by the end of Mr. Obama's first term.

I would make a modest prediction that in 2012, after four years of the man who was supposed to heal America’s relations with a world sick of all that swaggering cowboy unilateralism, those relations will be much worse. From Canada to India, the implications of the Obama ascendancy are becoming painfully clear. The other week Der Spiegel ran a piece called “Why Obamania Isn’t the Answer,” which might more usefully have been published before the Obamessiah held his big Berlin rally. Written by some bigshot with the German Council on Foreign Relations and illustrated by the old four-color hopey-changey posters all scratched up and worn out, the essay conceded that Europe had embraced Obama as a “European American.” Very true. The president is the most European American ever to sit in the Oval Office. And, because of that, he doesn’t need any actual European Europeans getting in the way — just as, at his big victory-night rally in Chicago, the first megastar president didn’t need any megastar megastars from Hollywood clogging up the joint: Movie stars who wanted to fly in were told by his minders that he didn’t want any other celebrities deflecting attention from him. Same with world leaders. If it’s any consolation to Gordon Brown, he’s just not that into any of you.

I'm not sure he's into any of us Americans either.