Cheney: This is just the “logical outcome of three-and-a-half years of Obama foreign policy”

I just wanted to take a moment to draw your attention to this particular op-ed, because…dang. Former Bush-administration State Department official Liz Cheney is going straight for the jugular with this one, and it is as damning an account of President Obama’s foreign policy failures as I’ve read.

In March 2009, at an Americas summit meeting in Mexico City, President Obama listened as Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega delivered a venomous diatribe against America. Mr. Obama stood to speak and accepted Mr. Ortega’s version of history. “I’m very grateful,” Mr. Obama said, “that President Ortega didn’t blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”

In April 2009, in France, Mr. Obama proclaimed that America must make deep cuts in its nuclear arsenal because only then would the country have “the moral authority to say to Iran, don’t develop a nuclear weapon, to say to North Korea, don’t proliferate nuclear weapons.” Embracing the leftist fallacy that the key to world peace is for the U.S. to pre-emptively disarm, the president has reportedly begun reviewing options to take our nuclear stockpile to levels not seen since 1950. These are steps you take only if you believe that America—not her enemies—is the threat. …

If you really want to know whether our adversaries fear us, ask the Russians, whose thuggish President Putin essentially endorsed Mr. Obama recently. Perhaps Mr. Putin is banking on the missile defense “flexibility” Mr. Obama promised he would have after the election.

The president says he “ended the war in Iraq” and is “ending the war in Afghanistan.” If only wishing made it so. A better description of what Mr. Obama is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is rushing for the exits. … He is so busy retreating that we are likely to leave in a our wake a failed state where the Taliban and terrorist organizations like al Qaeda can once again operate.

As Cheney points out, most of President Obama’s dealings on the international stage have been nothing short of a string of groveling apologies and attempts to weaken America and fall back to everybody else’s impuissant level, instead of us telling themwhat’s up, because apparently we don’t have to “moral authority” to do so. Wow. There are real and growing existential threats in this world, but the president has targeted military cuts before entitlement reform, appeased hostile foreign bodies, and willfully diminished America’s authority — and while we (rightfully) tend to be more preoccupied with more insular concerns, it’s important not to forget that this president’s policies abroad haven’t been any better for America than his domestic ones.

As Larry Sabato tweeted this morning,