The Israelis quickly found that the Obama White House deemed Jerusalem a larger threat to Middle East peace than Tehran. The Eastern Europeans saw the missile-defense system negotiated by President Bush taken away from them, even after the Russians had invaded Georgia.
All this stirred great debate. Because the direct consequences of these policies had not been felt by Americans, however, they had not really affected President Obama’s bid for re-election. Until Benghazi…
Whatever his faults as a presidential candidate, whatever the failures of his campaign, to read over the transcript from that first presidential debate back in 2008 today is to realize that almost all of what Mr. McCain warned us about regarding Mr. Obama’s foreign policy has come to pass: the danger of setting specific withdrawal dates for our troops; the naiveté of pledging to negotiate with leaders such as Castro, Ahmadinejad and Chavez without first insisting on conditions; the threat to Israel; going too light on Russia; the precarious situation in Pakistan, and so on.
