I don’t know how I missed this but Michael Gerson wrote his impressions of what the first 100 days of an Obama presidency might look like. An excerpt (emphasis mine):
Redeeming his Inaugural pledge to “pay any price, bear any burden, fly any distance to meet with our enemies,” Obama’s first major international meeting is with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. National security adviser Samantha Power does her best to talk tough on human rights in preparation for the meeting. But, as Henry Kissinger once said, “When talks become their own objective, they are at the mercy of the party most prepared to break them off.” Having made Iranian talks “without precondition” his major foreign policy goal, Obama is left with little leverage to extract concessions, and little choice but to move forward.
The New York Post runs a front-page picture of the Obama/Ahmadinejad handshake under the headline “Surrender Summit!” The story notes another of Obama’s historic firsts: the first American president to meet with a Holocaust denier. The Israeli prime minister publicly asks, “Why is the American president meeting with a leader who calls us ‘filthy bacteria’ and threatens to wipe us ‘off the map’?” Tens of thousands protest in Tel Aviv, carrying signs reading “Chamberlain Lives!”
America’s moderate Arab allies in the region also feel betrayed, assuming that America is cutting a bilateral deal with Iran that accepts its nuclear ambitions, while leaving the Sunni powers out in the cold. The Egyptian press notes that President Obama’s motorcade in Tehran passed near a street named in honor of Khaled Eslamboli, the assassin of President Anwar Sadat.
Shell-shocked by the criticism, the Obama administration moves its forthcoming presidential summit with Raul Castro to the Turks and Caicos, in a vain attempt to limit press scrutiny. The four-minute, Friday evening meeting — photographers are forbidden — still results in hundreds of thousands of Cuban protesters in Miami. Spouses of the imprisoned and tortured carry pictures of their loved ones. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez praises Obama’s visit as a “public apology for generations of American imperialism and militarism.”
At the same time, the Obama administration is arm-twisting Mexico and Canada into a renegotiation of NAFTA. The Mexican president wonders aloud to the press: “Why is the new president courting his enemies in the hemisphere while insulting his closest friends?”