Photo Credit: AP

I saw it all coming. In my 2010 book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, I noted that one student who was interviewed after an Obama town hall meeting during his first presidential trip to Europe in 2009 said happily: “He sounds just like a European.” That is, not like an American president who loves his country. And he doesn’t: asked during that visit to Europe about American exceptionalism, Obama answered: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

In other words, he didn’t believe in American exceptionalism at all. In a seminal moment for modern historians and active political observers like myself, a snapshot came across the newswires in May 2008, showing candidate Obama crossing an airplane tarmac, mid-gait, and holding Fareed Zakaria’s American epitaph, The Post-American World. In the photo, Obama is holding his place in the book with his finger, as if he didn’t dare put it down and wanted to dive back into it as soon as he could.

The vicious Zakaria describes his book this way: “This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” In it, he details the era he hopes we are entering now — a world in which the United States would “no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures.” He asserts that the “rise of the rest” is the “great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.”

Obama seems bound and determined to drive America over a cliff and make Zakaria’s vision of the future a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obama went to work from his first day in office to make Zakaria’s wishful thinking about America’s decline a reality. As the most powerful man in the world, he would level the playing field, even if it meant cutting America off at the knees. Good and evil would be made equivalent, with evil sanctioned by the world’s only remaining superpower. He turned against our allies (particularly Israel) and showed them that America could not be relied on. He taxed us into poverty and stirred up racial strife to make us all less safe. He has enabled Russia to re-emerge as a world power, and the Islamic jihadists are bolder than ever.

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