President Obama: Foreign Policy Disasters in Middle East Are Small Potatoes Compared to Forthcoming Paris Climate Treaty Triumph

CBS’s Sixty Minutes on 11th October aired Steve Kroft’s interview of President Barack Obama.  The most heated part of the interview concerned the administration’s disastrous foreign policy in the Middle East and Russia’s intervention in Syria.  At its climax, Steve Kroft said: “He's [Putin’s] challenging your leadership, Mr. President. He's challenging your leadership—”  President Obama interrupted: “Well Steve, I got to tell you, if you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in in order to prop up your only ally is leadership, then we've got a different definition of leadership. My definition of leadership would be leading on climate change, an international accord that potentially we'll get in Paris.”

The President’s remarks can be seen as merely a pathetic attempt to change the subject.  A much more worrying alternative explanation is that he actually believes this stuff.  Here is what President Obama said in his long Rolling Stone interview with Jeff Goodell conducted on his Alaska trip: “Every so often, John Holdren, the head of my science advisory group, sends out the latest data, and I make sure that not only me but my entire senior staff read it. And the last few reports have gotten everybody feeling like we've got to get moving on this, and to see what kinds of tools we can use to really have an impact.”  It is as astonishing as it is dismaying that the President has been listening to Dr. John Holdren for over six years and still hasn’t realized that his chief science advisor is deranged. 

Following President Obama’s lead, National Security Adviser Susan Rice said in a speech at Stanford University on 12th October that climate change was an “advancing menace” that threatened national and global security.  She also claimed that climate change was one of the causes of the war in Syria.