The Gloves Come Off While Obama had no way of knowing that the Iranian nuclear talks might be headed for a brick wall, he should have seen it coming. A few weeks before the March 1 deadline to strike a deal, one of Obama’s top national security advisers said that any deal might face a “cliff” because, “we’re either going to need to get to [a] breakthrough or get run over by events.” That pretty much describes what happened. Events, not goodwill, ended up defeating the Iranian deal. This was predictable. It’s as if Obama walked down the same block every day for four years and didn’t see the collision coming when the first person turned left and he turned right. This is like walking forward with your head down all day, not looking around, thinking you’re alone in the universe, when suddenly you’re plowed over by a speeding car. The world wasn’t getting smaller. It was growing darker and more dangerous. And even if Obama had gotten a good deal, what would it have done for the United States? While it would have made some strategic sense to get out of Iran, it wouldn’t have made much sense politically. Getting tough on Iran for violating the Iran deal wouldn’t have been popular with pro-Iran groups in America or with our regional allies who had more important things to worry about than whether Iran and the United States were doing the right thing by the world. It was better to let Iran get away with it and then use this as a rationale to impose more sanctions that could get them to the table in a more cooperative spirit. But there’s still more. The world isn’t just shrinking and turning darker. It is getting worse. The Iran deal was a part of Obama’s strategy to prevent America’s decline. But decline is inevitable. You can’t stop it, only endure it. Obama didn’t know that, but he should have known, especially when he couldn’t see the decline coming. It’s not just Iran that has gotten nastier. America’s relationships with several countries around the world are at or near the lowest point they have been since I covered the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the late 1970s. I watched as President Jimmy Carter, who was much more interested in doing good things than Barack Obama is, was roundly mocked by much of Europe for his failures. But by the time I was covering these things, even Carter’s worst critics agreed that he had done the right thing in the Middle East by forcing Egypt’s Anwar Sadat to make peace with Israel. The criticism had nothing to do with the merits of the deal Carter was pursuing. The criticism was about Israel. Our allies were not supposed to publicly criticize our closest ally. The most pro-Israel politician you could find was a guy named Alan Cranston, who represented California in the U.S. Senate. (He ran for president twice for no other reason than to defend Israel). But with the passage of time, the criticism has been replaced by something worse: indifference. And now we’re beginning to see the consequences of that in Russia. The Russian-Georgian war that broke out last week was the most recent example of Obama’s inability to deal with Russia. It’s been a problem for him for a while. One reason is that he’s too busy working on some other things to worry about Russia. They’ve also been less interested in dealing with him since he won the presidency. One way they have sought to deal with him is by helping Iran get a nuclear deal with the United States. So when he turned on Iran’s leader in 2013 and imposed more sanctions on Russia’s president, they retaliated by helping the Iranians get a nuclear deal with the U.S. Now we’re all paying the price for Obama’s weakness. Meanwhile, if they don’t respect him, Obama won’t respect them either. So when the president started making more frequent and public appearances on college campuses, people with experience in higher education were stunned. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” an official from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni told the Washington Post. “The college president should not appear on campus.” The appearance schedule of the president of the United States, and the behavior of the leader of Russia, who sees the world as a giant chessboard and wants to change the rules at every turn, is an act of war against all other nations. This is what is getting worse, not better, under Obama. Our allies don’t want to be seen as undermining their own presidents. Iran doesn’t want its president photographed laughing and joking with a guy whose goal was to do what he said he would do: get rid of him and his nuclear program. Russia doesn’t want its president caught smiling while its leader threatens to go to war with Ukraine over a piece of land, Crimea, that was given to Russia by Khrushchev in the early 1960s. Obama would be the first to agree with Vladimir Putin that Russia should retain control over Crimea. But then he was the one who decided to give Russia a freer hand in Syria, which is one of the things Putin thought he had won when he invaded Crimea, a land he claimed was still part of Russia. In addition, he has helped Putin retain control over Ukraine through Obama’s failure to impose more sanctions on Russia. They aren’t going to like the fact that they can’t change the rules they want to change whenever they want to change them anymore. We live in a world where Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said his government was considering making a public statement about Ukraine. How did he know that? Obama’s foreign policy is a problem for everyone, including Russia, but not a big one for Russia. The damage he has caused has been to the United States, but this is a guy who is so busy writing speeches for himself that he doesn’t have time for anyone else. He also has turned out to be a president who cannot keep promises, which might be good news for Americans in the upcoming election, since it won’t be a contest about who is going to do the least damage to America. If that had been the point of the election, Romney would be president. Obama has demonstrated the same weakness that was found in him during the campaign. And it’s only going to get worse. The bad news is that there is no sign of this getting better. All that happens under Obama is the decline of America. The only thing that could have prevented that from happening is if Obama had seen things earlier and had taken decisive action to fix the things he was wrong about. He wasn’t wrong about the need to fight the recession caused by the 2008 financial crisis. But he’s only been able to make things worse in the Middle East by opposing the war in Iraq and opposing what we’re now doing in Syria. That’s a record he’s going to have to explain to his successor, no matter how bad things get. And even if Obama remains in office until 2017, which is the best-case scenario, things will still get worse. This administration’s goal was to weaken America’s defenses. If the past is a guide, Obama’s successor will continue in that effort. There’s no cause for celebration. The best way to explain Obama’s foreign policy to his successor would be to say that he wasn’t trying to destroy America, he was just weak. And, for a guy who has promised to do better, his weakness is another example of the failure of the Obama presidency. It’s also another example of why we’re going to have to get used to living in a nation that is weaker and meaner under Obama than it was before he took office. The worse things get, the less influence America will have in the world. As the old saying goes: It is better to be safe than to be sorry.