The Cheese Stands Alone

American foreign policy purports to be built in modern times on a disinterest in "nation building." Accordingly, we must choose to prop up regimes that, when the chips are truly down, can be counted on to provide support to us in our own pursuit of foreign policy goals. World War II was a good example in that we were in bed with Stalin in order to defeat a more serious threat from Hitler.

Hosni Mubarak succeeded Anwar Sadat. Throughout the rules of these two men the U.S. has had a friend in Egypt. In light of the commonly accepted truth that we have few friends in that area of the world, it has been in our national self interest to overlook on many occasions the way Egypt operated in a number of spheres. Of course there are things done in Egypt that we would never permit in our own democracy. Undoubtedly there were violations of human rights. The list of "concerns" could go on.

It behooves us to remember that President Anwar Sadat took a bullet from his own army because of his willingness to consider talking with the State of Israel, a willingness that we pressed upon him in a highly public and pressure filled visit to Camp David. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, has been able to continue as our ally for 30 years. For those who haven't checked lately, you can count our allies in the Middle East on one hand.

Now there is a concerted effort to bring down regimes that are not fundamentalist and replace them with more leaders like those with which we must deal in current day Iran. Egypt may fall to fundamentalism. If so, others will shortly fall also. The end result will be a block of mid-east fundamental regimes with no greater purpose than the decimation of the State of Israel and all out terrorism against the United States.

We played this game of Russian roulette a number of years ago when President Carter turned our national back on the Shah of Iran because of his human rights violations. Not only did we lose a strategic ally in that part of the world we gained a new foe in the form of a fundamentalist state that hates our nation, threatens the area with the creation of nuclear weapons, denies the Holocaust, ignore the United Nations and generally funds and encourages the kind of revolt currently happening in Egypt.

So we made our point: we do not support regimes that do not act nicely. We were instrumental in putting in place a far more threatening, irrational and horrible regime.

Short sighted. Naive. Foolish. I would apply all three adjectives to our foreign policy under James Earl Carter. President Obama would do well to study history. As in the old childrens' song "The Farmer in the Dell"-ultimately the "cheese stands alone."

The "cheese" in this instance is The United States of America.

It is a wake up call.