Obama’s European Progress – during which he bowed deeply to the paymaster of jihad, ‘King’ Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and day after day, in speech after speech, denigrated the country he leads – was an historical landmark, the start in all likelihood of a global catastrophe.

Here’s what the columnist Diana West has written:

An American bow to Saudi Arabia … was calumny on a historic level. King Abdullah, after all, is the head of a state that is the very caricature of modern-day evil, a Sharia dictatorship that fosters religious repression, de facto slavery, subjugation of women, and, not least, the international export of jihad and Sharia through "charities," mosques, madrassas, textbooks, university endowments, Sharia finance and, of course, terrorists, some 15 of whom attacked the United States in 2001. Just last month, Abdullah elevated the delusionally hard-line interior minister Prince Nayef, who long promoted the crackpot theory that Saudis were not involved in 9/11 (it was the Jews, he said), to a direct line of succession to the Saudi throne. Abdullah himself has donated at least $1.35 million to Saudi telethons that raised $174 million for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers from Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. In 2007, Abdullah explicitly denounced the U.S. presence in Iraq as "illegitimate," thus encouraging attacks on Americans in Iraq, where, not incidentally, Saudis are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than any other nationality. That’s just for starters. In other words, this is not a personage an American president can ever, ever show deference to without besmirching the memories and lives of the American dead and maimed. But that’s just what President Obama did (despite lame claims from the White House that Obama was just shaking hands), making this incident more than a simple gaffe.

She adds:  ‘Obama is the first Muslim-born US president. Could that have something to do with the deepness of the bow?’

And this is how Charles Krauthammer expressed his wonder and offense at the opéra bouffe:

Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.… It is passing strange for a world leader to celebrate his own country’s decline.  

Nor was it only with gestures and words that the wrecking was done. As North Korea launched a long-range missile of a sort that could carry nuclear warheads all the way to the US, the prince of apologies not only abandoned Japan to its fears of a nuclear-armed enemy in its region, but took away any hope of support in the future by announcing cuts in America’s missile defense, including interceptors expressly designed to shoot North Korean missiles out of the sky. North Korea and Iran are implicitly licensed to continue co-operating on the development of nuclear warheads. The leader of the free world will do nothing to stop them. Worse than that – not only will he take no effective action to prevent the genocidal mullahs of Iran from becoming a nuclear power, he will do his utmost to prevent Israel from  taking such action even though its very existence is at stake.  

On bended knee – figuratively this time – he begged Russia to reduce its nuclear arsenal commensurately with his own proposed reductions, so restoring it – at least in its own self-esteem – to the status of a rival super-power. To what result? Regardless of the flattery, Russia demurred. America was humiliated, but Obama himself was morally elevated, at least in the eyes of his claques, the mobs both outside and inside the US who ecstatically praise his  abasement and weakening of  the only true superpower, of which Obama himself incredibly and tragically is the president.

On he went to Iraq. The comparative freedom won there by years of American effort and sacrifice was not of sufficient concern to him to elicit any commitment to preserve it when he made his stop-over call. What will Iraq do, where will it look for support, when Iran threatens it with nuclear weapons?     

Nations that have put their trust in America for their freedom or sheer survival have seen their erstwhile protector turn its back on them and smile encouragingly at their enemies: the tyrants, totalitarians, and jihadists. Japan, India, Israel, Iraq, Poland, Georgia, the Ukraine, the Czech Republic, the Baltic States, Taiwan need new alliances, new means of defense. The United Sates is deserting them. Oppressed minorities in Asia, Africa, and South America must cast aside any hope they had that the hitherto greatest defender of freedom might ever again lift a finger to save them.

Here’s what Caroline Glick, columnist for the Jerusalem Post, has to say, in perhaps an over-sanguine state of mind:

[Vice-president] Biden …  made clear that from the administration’s perspective, an Israeli strike that prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power is less acceptable than a nuclear-armed Iran. That is, the Obama administration prefers to see Iran become a nuclear power than to see Israel secure its very existence. America’s betrayal of its democratic allies makes each of them more vulnerable to aggression at the hands of their enemies – enemies the Obama administration is now actively attempting to appease. And as the US strengthens their adversaries at their expense, these spurned democracies must consider their options for surviving as free societies in this new, threatening, post-American environment. For the most part, America’s scorned allies lack the ability to defeat their enemies on their own. India cannot easily defeat nuclear-armed Pakistan, which itself is fragmenting into disparate anti-Indian nuclear-wielding Islamist and Islamist-supporting factions. Japan today cannot face North Korea – which acts as a Chinese proxy – on its own without risking a confrontation with China. Russia’s invasion of Georgia last August showed clearly that its former republics and satellites have no way of escaping Moscow’s grip alone… And the Obama administration’s intense efforts to woo Iran coupled with its plan to slash the US’s missile defense programs – including those in which Israel participates – and reportedly pressure Israel to dismantle its own purported nuclear arsenal – make clear that Israel today stands alone against Iran. The risks that the newly inaugurated post-American world pose for America’s threatened friends are clear. But viable opportunities for survival do exist, and Israel can and must play a central role in developing them. Specifically, Israel must move swiftly to develop active strategic alliances with Japan, Iraq, Poland, and the Czech Republic and it must expand its alliance with India. With Israel’s technological capabilities, its intelligence and military expertise, it can play a vital role in shoring up these countries’ capacities to contain the rogue states that threaten them. And by containing the likes of Russia, North Korea and Pakistan, they will make it easier for Israel to contain Iran even in the face of US support for the mullahs. The possibilities for strategic cooperation between and among all of these states and Israel run the gamut from intelligence sharing to military training, to missile defense, naval development, satellite collaboration, to nuclear cooperation.

How would it have been if Obama had not deserted these countries? Cliff May suggests:  

A thought experiment: Suppose North Korea’s Taepo Dong-2 missile had been launched – and then been knocked out of the sky by an American, Japanese or South Korean missile defense system. Kim would have been hopping mad. The Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Syrians and others … might have given some hard thought to whether it makes sense to devote time and resources to developing nuclear weapons and missile systems that the U.S. and its allies will have the resolve and the ability to neutralize. In fact, the U.S. and Japan did have Aegis destroyers tracking the North Korean missile. Some of those ships carried missile interceptors that could have brought down the North Korean missile. A decision was made not to do so.

What moves Obama? Is it all just for his own personal aggrandizement? He seems to crave adulation, and he got plenty of it from worshippers in every country he visited; immense applause from happy-clappy fans, including the journalists who have unapologetically abandoned any pretense of objectivity or respect for the truth in the throes of their mindless crush.

But beneath the vanity, the posing, the holding-forth, the charm offensive, the performance, there is surely a deep-seated desire , planted in him from his earliest youth, reinforced by his education and his lefty buddies in Chicago, to see America demoted, the cruel Third World appeased, the rich made poor, the successful brought low, a socialist leveling, an all-controlling government, and an end to the impudence of liberty.    

America has elected its own willful destroyer. An astounding thing.