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Prez comes across as a gullible sap

President Obama yesterday did his best impression of a high-school soph omore participating in his first Model UN meeting, retailing pious clichés he learned from his pony-tailed social studies teacher.

Even Woodrow Wilson might have blanched at the mushy-headed exhortations to world peace and collective action better suited to a college dorm-room bull session or a holiday-season Coca-Cola commercial.

“No nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” Obama intoned. “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.”

Has an American president ever expressed such implicit hostility toward his own nation’s pre-eminence in world affairs? Or so relished in recalling its failings, or so readily elevated himself and his own virtues over those of his country?

Between America and the world, Obama adopts a happy medium. It is in this sense only that he is a centrist.

“For those who question the character and cause of my nation,” Obama said, “I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.” In other words, he’s the redeemer of a nation sunk in war crimes (we condoned torture), high-handedness (we ignored the United Nations) and hypocrisy (we promoted democracy selectively) prior to the ascension of his blessed administration.

“We’ve re-engaged the United Nations,” Obama bragged. “We have paid our bills. We have joined the Human Rights Council. We have signed the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We have fully embraced the Millennium Development Goals.”

And he thinks it’s going to get him something: “Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone.”

All together now: Yes, they can!

Obama’s mistake is in believing “the interests of nations and peoples are shared.” They aren’t. Georgia has an interest in becoming a strong nation capable of defending itself; Russia has an interest in quashing it. China has an interest in dominating all of East Asia; Japan and other neighbors have an interest in containing it.

Iran has an interest in gaining a nuclear weapon; Israel — and the United States — has an interest in stopping it.

On the latter, Obama was shockingly weak, if his weakness still retained the capacity to shock. He outlined with great specificity what the United States will do to reduce its own nuclear arsenal. We’ll pursue a nuclear agreement with the Russians, move on ratifying the Test Ban Treaty, complete a Nuclear Posture Review, etc.

As for Iran, if it moves ahead on its nuclear program, it “must be held accountable.”

How? Obama can’t say, because Moscow and even Paris apparently haven’t gotten word about the “new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” Both are making discouraging noises about any serious sanctions against Iran.

Obama’s version of America leadership mostly consists of a public diplomacy of self-flagellation and rhetoric touting fashionable causes. He’ll pursue global disarmament and fight global warming. Indeed, Laurie David, not Hillary Clinton, might be ideally suited to be his secretary of state.

Obama hopes that all our self-effacing niceness will catalyze the world into ending its “bickering about outdated grievances.” No wonder he twice had to deny that he was being naive.

The president isn’t wrong to talk sweepingly of peace. Ronald Reagan did the same thing, although with a concomitant emphasis on freedom. But Reagan realized the world wouldn’t lead itself, at least not where we should want it to go.

Look no further than the United Nations, that incoherent collection of the world’s finest democracies and most dismal dictatorships. At the end of his speech, Obama said the United Nations could be “a place where we indulge tyranny, or a source of moral authority.”

Immediately afterward, Moammar Khadafy took the podium for a rambling, 90-minute address. Even a first-time Model UN student might have noted the incongruity.

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