From Thursday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly:
So: After that speech, the U.S. delegation at the U.N. says that what the president of Iran had said was abhorrent and delusional. And then [the] State Department issues a statement, and it accuses him of being outrageous.
And yet an hour earlier, our president, on the same stage, same podium, reaches out his hand, opens the door to new negotiations with a man who apparently is abhorrent, delusional, and outrageous.
Now there’s a real disconnect here.
Obama operates under the assumption that all Iran has to do is to show its sincerity, that it’s meeting its obligations under the NPT. This is the way a law professor speaks about the duties and obligations of a citizen in a cozy civil society where all of us agree on the norms.
The international arena is a state of nature where there are no norms, especially for a regime like Iran’s, a rogue regime. And it acts in its own interest to acquire its own — and to augment its own — power. To pretend, as Obama does, that this is only a question of obligations and duties, and to again stretch out a hand that’s been spat on for 20 months is simply unbelievable. It betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of the international community that is not even a law professor’s — it’s an adolescent’s.