Photo Credit: Free Beacon …Watching the strange mix of clumsiness and insouciance with which Barack Obama and John Kerry approach the world, the abstract and aloof manner in which they comment and posture on foreign affairs, it is hard not to recall Hardy’s metaphor of growing dangers distant from the center of civilization. The recent news of a possible terrorist plot against airliners flying to the United States, and of a threat against the U.S. embassy in Uganda, remind us of the durability of the ideology and menace of Islamic terrorism. The ability of non-monarchical Arab governments to control their populations has collapsed, creating an arc of stateless space that begins in Libya and Egypt, is briefly interrupted by the tiny, embattled, belittled, and bullied Jewish State, and extends through Lebanon into Syria and western Iraq.

This is our iceberg. Within its confines murderers and barbarians roam, butchering each other and anyone else who is caught in the crossfire. Within its confines followers of al Qaeda gather and plot. They will not remain within its confines for long, though. Anyone who pays the least attention to the articles inside the New York Times will have noticed leaks by officers of our intelligence agencies, leaks desperately warning that the jihadists have turned their eyes to Europe and to the United States. It is no secret. At the end of last month the Director of National Intelligence told Congress that al Qaeda is no less of a threat than it was when it attacked in 2001.

Our response? The United States has no influence in Egypt, it has left the Syrian dictator more secure, it has left him with his stash of WMD, and it has no pull over Lebanon, no pull over Iraq. The United States is gutting its military, it is pursuing negotiations with Iran whose only point is, in the words of one former Obama official, to “buy time.” It is withdrawing from Afghanistan and leaving it in the hands of the former hosts of al Qaeda, and it is lifting asylum restrictions to make it easier for Syrians with “loose ties” to terrorism to migrate here.

The United States is about to lose strategically important drone bases in Afghanistan, it has found itself out-maneuvered by Vladimir Putin at every turn, its policies toward hotspots in Venezuela and Ukraine seem nonexistent. The policy is to talk above all, to keep talking in Geneva with the Syrians, to keep talking in Vienna with the Iranians, to keep talking in Jerusalem with the Israelis and the Palestinians, no matter that the talk accomplishes nothing, no matter that it drains resources, energy, and personnel that could be put to more constructive use elsewhere. His policy in Syria in tatters, his negotiations with Iran a charade, the secretary of State flew to Indonesia last week to rally the world against the amorphous force of climate change. Why do something about 130,000 dead Syrians, about proliferating weapons of mass destruction, when you can poke fun of those who dissent from the scientific consensus?

The territory over which al Qaeda claims sovereignty is growing, our influence in the Middle East is shrinking, and serious contenders for the American presidency want to make it more difficult for the government to survey the enemy. Our president and his administration interpret these developments, if they interpret them at all, in isolation, as discrete situations, as the inevitable consequences of the post-American world they are so diligently helping to bring into being. “Alien they seemed to be,” Hardy writes. “No mortal eye could see / The intimate welding of their later history.”

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