What more can we conclude after reading James Taranto that Barack Obama has sold out the United States to Russia?

Taranto begins with Vladimir Putin’s New York Times piece …

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

… and then from there:

That last line is a fallacy of composition. From the premise that all men are created equal, it does not follow that all countries are. But the rhetorical trick is clever. Putin (or perhaps a ghostwriter at Ketchum PR) rests his disparagement of American exceptionalism on its very basis–on the first of the “truths” that the Founding Fathers held “to be self-evident.”

This is right out of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals“: “The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more live up to their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity.” (Putin also appeals to the pope’s authority.)

And the Russian president applies this rule not just to America, but to Obama, whose own ambivalence about American exceptionalism is well known:

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

Can you think of another world leader who rode similar sentiments into office? Hint: He defeated John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Putin’s piece is aimed at influencing American public opinion for the purpose of undermining the effectiveness of American power. It deviously reinforces both dovish and hawkish arguments against the administration’s Syria policy. It reminds the doves that military action against Syria goes against everything they believe–and that Obama as a candidate claimed to believe. It reminds the hawks that Obama has shown no inclination or capacity to lead a serious military effort.

Washington’s responses have been pitiful. “That’s all irrelevant,” CNN quotes a White House official as saying: “[Putin] put this proposal forward and he’s now invested in it. That’s good. That’s the best possible reaction. He’s fully invested in Syria’s CW disarmament and that’s potentially better than a military strike–which would deter and degrade but wouldn’t get rid of all the chemical weapons. He now owns this. He has fully asserted ownership of it and he needs to deliver.”

In his op-ed, Putin even disputes that the regime used poison gas. “There is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.” He isn’t committed to disarming the regime but to keeping it in power–a goal that is served by undermining whatever shred of resolve America might have had to act. …

Putin doesn’t take his readers for idiots, he takes Obama for a fool–a bumbling improviser who can be rolled by appealing to his vanity and his short-term political needs, and whose actions have no broader purpose. Even the New York Times editorial page acknowledges that last point: “The [Tuesday] speech lacked any real sense of what Mr. Obama’s long-term or even medium-term strategy might be, other than his repeated promise not to drag a nation fed up with wars into a ‘boots-on-the-ground’ fight.”

Yet the Times ends on a hopeful note: “At least Syria has admitted that it has chemical weapons, for the first time ever; Mr. Putin has acknowledged to the world that there must be limits on the blank checks he was writing his client state; and Russia and the United States are working toward a common strategic goal for the first time in a very long time.”

So America has no strategy and is “working” with Russia “toward a common strategic goal”? The only way to reconcile those two assertions is to admit that Putin has capitalized on America’s purposelessness in order to advance his own purposes. As a Times news story puts it: “Suddenly Mr. Putin has eclipsed Mr. Obama as the world leader driving the agenda in the Syria crisis.” …

Because America is so much mightier than Russia, the American presidency is a much stronger position than the Russian presidency. But a strong man in a position of weakness, if he is ruthless about taking advantage of his adversary’s vulnerabilities, can get the better of weak man in a position of strength. Saul Alinsky understood that, and so does Vladimir Putin.

Mark Steyn adds:

Time magazine publishes four global editions: The cover story of the Europe/Africa edition, the Asia edition and the Pacific edition reflect what actually happened this week; the cover story of the US edition is some heartwarming fluff about nothing. The palace guard in the America media are doing a straddle Pravda and Comical Ali never had to attempt – telling the truth to the world while keeping their domestic readership in the dark.

Hence, the cooing coverage of this weekend’s “agreement”. A “deal” that pretends to be about chemical weapons inspections is, in fact, a deal that “the US will not interfere in Syria’s civil war“. Under the absurd plans to send international inspectors into a war-zone is an agreement by Obama and Putin that what happened to a US client in Egypt and a French client in Tunisia and an Anglo-American-French client in Libya will not be permitted to happen to a Russo-Iranian client in Syria.

Whether Obama knows that’s what he’s signed on to is unclear. But, if you don’t think the Middle East and the wider world get that message, you must be reading the US edition of Time.

Longer Steyn:

For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.

It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.

All this the average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” In the biographical tag at the end, the Times editors informed us: “Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.” But by this stage, one would not have been surprised to see: “Vladimir V. Putin is the author of the new memoir The Audacity of Vlad, which he will be launching at a campaign breakfast in Ames, Iowa, this weekend

As Iowahawk ingeniously summed it up, Putin is “now just basically doing donuts in Obama’s front yard.” …

With this op-ed Tsar Vlad is telling Obama: The world knows you haven’t a clue how to play the Great Game or even what it is, but the only parochial solipsistic dweeby game you do know how to play I can kick your butt all over town on, too.This is what happens when you elect someone because he looks cool standing next to Jay-Z. …

Putin has pulled off something incredible: He’s gotten Washington to anoint him as the international community’s official peacemaker, even as he assists Iran in going nuclear and keeping their blood-soaked Syrian client in his presidential palace. Already, under the “peace process,” Putin and Assad are running rings around the dull-witted Kerry, whose Botoxicated visage embodies all too well the expensively embalmed state of the superpower. …

Nobody, friend or foe, wants to hear about American exceptionalism when the issue is American ineffectualism. On CBS, Bashar Assad called the U.S. government “a social-media administration.” He’s got a better writer than Obama, too. America is in danger of being the first great power to be laughed off the world stage.