"Are we not friends of the persecuted Coptic Christian in Egypt? Are we not friends of the North Koreans enslaved in the gulag? Are we not friends of the repressed Cuban or Iranian democracy activist?" Those were the questions asked by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) on the floor of the House yesterday.
But we are not, and we cannot possibly be. Obama said so at the UN:
"No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War."
We are equidistant arbiters between Coptic Christians and the Mubarak regime, between gulag prisoners and the Kim regime, between Cubans and Castro, between democracy activists and Ahamadinejad.
Why is Wolf still clinging to antiquated concepts such as America's "friends"? Do we want to be, as Obama put it yesterday, "remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of the 20th century into the 21st"?
