A TREE GROWS IN WARSAW:
It’s amazing, to us at least, that so little comment is being issued in respect of the Warsaw meeting on the Middle East. What comment there has been out of Europe has mainly related to the Munich conference, where America was subjected the usual condescension from France and Germany — capped off by a nauseating speech by Vice President Biden saying America had become an “embarrassment.”
What a contrast with the parley in Warsaw. Ministers from all sorts of countries came together in what Secretary of State Pompeo called a “testament to our seriousness.” Said he: “Arab and Israeli leaders were in the same room, sharing a meal and exchanging views. They all came together for a single reason, to discuss the real threats to our respective people emanating from the Middle East.”
“Something big” is how that is characterized by our Benny Avni, who has covered all this for more than a generation.
It’s a mark of how determined the left is to deny the result of the 2016 election in America that the Warsaw parley is being met with not just short shrift but hostility. “Few Are Inspired,” was the headline phrase over the New York Times’ editorial. It saw the news as “how few major powers are cheering along” in a parley that it put down as an “anti-mullah pep rally.”
If it were such rally, what is wrong with that? No less a figure than President Obama conceded — in one of his interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg — that the Supreme Leader in Iran is an anti-semite. Iran is maneuvering aggressively against Israel and the Sunni Arab regimes across the Middle East. The Times thinks it’s Mr. Trump’s fault that Germany, France, Russia, and China aren’t with us.
Britain sent its foreign minister to Warsaw, the Times notes, but France and Germany sent lower-level envoys, “apparently reluctant to be part of such a bellicose bashing.” Or maybe they preferred to lurk at Munich and turn what the Wall Street Journal this morning calls “deaf ears” to Vice President Pence’s call for help on Iran, while applauding a former vice president — Joseph Biden — as he says how embarrassing he finds his own country.
Mr. Biden is supposedly wrestling, yet again, with the painful question of whether to run for president. If he does, his suggestion in Munich that America is an embarrassment could become his campaign slogan. Meantime, it looks to us like the administration is doing relatively well in Europe.
Well, don’t expect that to be the news media narrative any time soon.