Can it be accidental that Obama persists in bowing to foreign leaders like China’s President Hu Jintao?

Victor Davis Hanson can see no rational direction to Barack Obama’s foreign policy and bitterly complains that “Obama has no idea of what he is doing, and wings his way from one embarrassment to another.”

But Michael Ledeen thinks Hanson has overlooked the obvious explanation of what Obama means to do.

[W]hat if Obama does know what he’s doing? What if Victor has it right when he says that we are being transformed into a much larger version of the E.U.? (Actually, it’s a somewhat smaller version, but no matter.) …

He is not an admirer of America. He believes that America’s past behavior is the root cause of the world’s problems, and he wants to bring America under control by making it just another European country: impotent in world affairs (except for spreading the wealth) and stripped of its traditional exceptionalism at home.

That’s what his latest initiatives are all about, the new nuclear policy and the removal of clarity from our national-security doctrine by banning words like “jihad” and “Islam.” Since he considers us the problem, he imposes a nuclear doctrine that reins in America — the root cause of evil in the world. And since he wants to turn America into a weak country that will accept the political correctness of the feckless “international community,” he adjusts our language to bring it into line with the U.N.’s version of Newspeak.

It’s worse than you thought, Victor. It’s not confusion at all. It’s a campaign to cut America down to size.