Before getting into the full litany of the president’s “oh well” approach to friends and allies, let’s stay with the Afridi situation for a moment. First, on its face, this is a travesty of justice—even according to Pakistani law. After all, if this man is guilty of treason for collaborating with the CIA, what about the Pakistani military’s on-again-off-again collaboration with the CIA and DoD? Are Pakistan’s president and generals going to be jailed for decades for their cooperation—albeit halfhearted or perhaps quarter-hearted—with Washington?

More importantly, we shouldn’t lose sight of the central fact that Afridi helped bring the world’s most notorious, most wanted, most infamous mass-murderer to justice. The trial of Afridi and the verdict reveal just how broken Pakistan is—something many observers, including myself, have pointed out for many years (here, here, here and here). If the best we can hope for is a transactional, interests-only relationship with Islamabad, then someone in the Obama administration needs to ask—amid Pakistan’s treatment of Afridi, sheltering of bin Laden, aiding of the Haqqani network and Taliban, outing of U.S. operatives, blockading of Afghanistan-bound equipment, firing on U.S. forces across the AfPak border—what exactly the United States is getting in the exchange.

If Washington had a sense of honor, it would demand Afridi’s release by a date certain and allow Islamabad to contemplate the consequences of not complying—a cutoff in aid, an expulsion of Pakistan’s diplomatic corps, a public unveiling and shaming of Pakistan’s duplicitous military-intelligence apparatus, another U.S. raid into the country.

Let’s start with this year’s summit agenda. The over-arching theme is NATO’s new “Smart Defense” program. NATO describes Smart Defense as “a renewed culture of cooperation that encourages Allies to cooperate in developing, acquiring and maintaining military capabilities” by “pooling and sharing capabilities, setting priorities and coordinating efforts better.” Under Smart Defense, alliance members will identify a goal and then designate a member to take the lead in shepherding other interested members toward that goal. One report notes that the Chicago Summit will launch Smart Defense efforts in logistics; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; and force protection. In addition, there are mine-clearing, helicopter-training and maritime-patrol projects on the Smart Defense to-do list.

In other words, Smart Defense is a low-impact, low-yield program for a NATO with lowered sights and lowered expectations. The president’s fingerprints are all over NATO’s un-ambitious 2012 summit. Not only is the summit being held in the president’s old stomping grounds of Chicago; it reflects his discomfort with American power and with America’s global leadership role (NATO being a vehicle for both).

Just compare the smallish plans of the Chicago Summit’s Smart Defense agenda with earlier summits.

In 1999, NATO pledged to make “full use of every opportunity to build an undivided continent by promoting and fostering the vision of a Europe whole and free,” underscoring its commitment to that goal by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the alliance. The Prague Summit in 2002 committed the alliance to the global fight against terrorism and WMDs—and invited seven new members into the fold. The headlines from NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit included formal membership invitations to Croatia and Albania, a promise of membership to Georgia and Ukraine and a unanimous endorsement of the U.S. missile defense system.

But in 2012 in Chicago, NATO’s 28 heads of state will focus on “a renewed culture of cooperation that encourages Allies to cooperate.” Gone are those heady promises of using NATO’s unique political-military capabilities to expand the zone of democracy, build the scaffolding of security, erase the lines of Moscow’s old empire and fight terror at its source.

The spinners will argue that NATO is focusing on low-key, process-type goals because so many big-picture goals are already being pursued. In truth, there are several strategic items NATO needs to address now—items that are far more important than mine-clearing or maritime patrols:

• Making sure Article 5 is credible. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is the heart and soul of the alliance, committing all members to the defense of a member that has been attacked. Yet Norwegian Minister of Defense Espen Barth Eide recently expressed worries about NATO’s ability “to deliver if something happens in the transatlantic theater of a more classical type of aggression.”—and understandably so. Even as Russia conducts provocative war games against a Polish “aggressor,” buzzes North American airspace and builds up its military, the alliance is slashing spending and deterrent commitments.
• Making missile defense a reality. To mollify Moscow, the Obama administration unilaterally scrapped the Bush administration’s missile-defense plans for Europe—plans that had been approved by all of NATO. So, instead of planting a permanent ground-based defense in Poland and support radars in the Czech Republic, the Obama administration chose to deploy extra missile-defense warships to the Mediterranean and land-based variants of the sea-based system in Eastern Europe. One Czech official angrily rejected President Obama’s plans as “a consolation prize.”A spokesperson for Poland’s Ministry of Defense called the Obama administration’s reversal “catastrophic for Poland.” Just as bad, Washington has allowed Turkey to get away with warning that it will not allow U.S. missile-defense radars that are deployed on Turkish soil to share info with Israel. Neither policy—deploying a watered-down version of missile defense to placate Russia or allowing Turkey to dictate what America can do with its technology—makes any sense, serves the wider interests of the alliance or helps protect America and it allies from Iran’s growing missile arsenal.
• Defining NATO’s long-term relationship with Afghanistan. With NATO members heading for the exits, the relationship is anything but clear.Washington just signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) with Kabul that raises more questions than it answers. For example, the SPA calls on NATO member states “to sustain and improve Afghan security capabilities beyond 2014.” That seems unlikely as NATO nations shrink their militaries. The SPA views “any external aggression against Afghanistan” with “grave concern.” Yet in this same document, the United States “pledges not to use Afghan territory or facilities as a launching point for attacks against other countries.” The document states that the U.S.and Afghanistan “reaffirm” their commitment to “defeating al Qaeda and its affiliates.” Yet NATO plans to reduce Afghan troop strength from 352,000 to 230,000 after 2014.
• Reaching the 2-percent-of-GDP threshold on defense spending. The alliance wants to use Smart Defense as a vehicle for “rebalancing defense spending between the European nations and the United States”—and for good reason. Two years ago, just five NATO members—the United States, Britain, France, Greece and Albania—met the alliance’s 2-percent standard. According to NATO’s latest report on financial and economic data, only three meet that standard today. Not surprisingly, the United States now accounts for 75 percent of NATO’s defense spending, exceeding the U.S. share of 50 percent during the Cold War. The consequences are already on display. In Libya, with the U.S.leading from behind, NATO was found woefully lacking in munitions, targeting and jamming capabilities, mid-air refueling planes, reconnaissance platforms, drones, and command-and-control assets—nearly everything needed to conduct a 21st-century air war. In Afghanistan, the United States is contributing 71 percent of all forces, and non-NATO members Australia, Georgia and Sweden have more troops deployed than several founding members of the alliance.
• • Growing the alliance. Even though it was invited into the alliance years ago, Macedonia has been left on the outside looking in because Greece refuses to accept Macedonia’s name. Whether it enters as Macedonia, FYROM or Big Mac, Macedonia has done more than enough to accommodate Athens and to show its commitment to the alliance. So has Georgia. It’s time to offer this tiny shard of the former Soviet Union a NATO membership action plan, the next step toward full membership.

“The United States should not expect others to deliver much,” former NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner once counseled. “They are waiting for the Americans.” In other words, everything that happens—or doesn’t happen—within NATO depends on U.S. leadership. When it comes to NATO, American presidents don’t lead from behind. They either lead, or the alliance flounders and frays—as it is today.

I. The document states that “cooperation between Afghanistan and the United States is based on mutual respect and shared interests.”

Try telling that to the families of U.S., British and French troops who have been killed by Afghan troops—there have been some 45 attacks by uniformed Afghan troops on U.S. and other NATO forces, killing 70 allied troops—or to the Western forces still fighting for Afghanistan, who have to look over their shoulders as they fight.

II. The document states that the U.S. and Afghanistan “reaffirm” their commitment to “defeating al Qaeda and its affiliates.”

There are two problems with this part of the agreement, and they are significant. First, the commitment of the Afghan government and military is shaky at best. (See Point I.) Fresh from a tour of Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel Davis describes Afghan troops as largely unwilling to engage the Taliban. According to a classified report leaked to The New York Times, one Afghan colonel describes his own troops as “thieves, liars and drug addicts.” An American quoted in the report says Afghan troops are “pretty much gutless in combat; we do most of the fighting.”

Second, just how committed are Kabul and Washington to defeating “al Qaeda and its affiliates” if the two have directed their diplomats to talk to al Qaeda’s closest, oldest affiliate? That would be the Taliban. It pays to recall that Afghanistan became the world headquarters for al Qaeda because the Taliban welcomed bin Laden with open arms. The Taliban and al Qaeda share the same worldview and the same enemy. Given the terror that was unleashed when the Taliban was in power—and their brutality since being ousted from power—there’s no reason to think Mullah Omar and his henchmen have changed. CIA Director David Petraeus certainly doesn’t think so. A year ago, when asked to make the case for staying the course, then-Gen. Petraeus bluntly replied, “Two words…Nine Eleven,” reminding us of what happened the last time the Taliban ruled Afghanistan.

Moreover, when it comes to commitment, it pays to recall, as Karzai surely has, that the Obama administration always keeps its eyes on the calendar and the exit sign—and has little regard for standing agreements with allies. Obama casually scrapped a hard-earned missile-defense agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic in order to get an arms control treaty of questionable merit with Russia; jettisoned Mubarak when the going got tough in Egypt; and when NATO allies made an urgent request for an extension of U.S. air power during the Libya war, a NATO official took pains to emphasize that America’s help “expires on Monday”—a bruising metaphor for what passes as American leadership in the age of Obama.

III. The document calls on NATO member states “to sustain and improve Afghan security capabilities beyond 2014 by taking concrete measures to implement” previous security agreements.

Good luck with that. Following Washington’s lead, NATO is headed for the exits. From the beginning, most NATO members have been half-hearted about the Afghanistan mission. Consider: The United States is contributing 71 percent of all forces to the mission; non-NATO members Australia, Georgia and Sweden have more troops deployed than Belgium, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal—all founding members of the alliance; Germany, Italy and Spain refused to help in Afghanistan’s restive south; Italy didn’t permit its fighter-bombers in Afghanistan to carry bombs; and German troops, until recently, were required to shout warnings to enemy forces—in three languages—before opening fire.

Stephen Marche has written a thought-provoking piece about what he terms the “war against youth.” Although a bit whiny at times and sprinkled with class-envy rhetoric—he warns of “flowers of rage,” derides “virulently purified capitalism” and writes approvingly about “the protesters, the occupiers, the kids who screamed themselves hoarse in the parks of New York and Oakland last year”—the thrust of the essay highlights the selfishness of the Baby Boomer generation and the consequences of that selfishness.

Here are a few of the consequences that Marche identifies: Pointing to the “economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in,” he argues that “There is a young America and there is an old America…One takes from the other.” He cites a 2009 Brookings Institution study to support his case: “The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children.”

Thanks to what he calls “30 years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young,” he notes that “in 1984, American breadwinners who were 65 and over made ten times as much as those under 35. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost 47 times as much as the younger generation.”

Maintaining a political-economic system that serves “the comfort and largesse of the old” helps explain the untouchable nature of the tax-guzzling Social Security and Medicare programs. Marche notes that the Social Security system will run out of funds in 2036, “so there’s just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age 90.” Indeed, he makes a compelling case that “the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers. Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way.”

In other words, the Boomers will likely eat through the safety net their parents handed down to them. Yet many Boomers loudly oppose reforms to the system that could extend its life. A PBS report found that simply raising the Social Security retirement age to 71 by 2040, and to 75 by 2070, would save enough money to cover the looming shortfalls. Likewise, to preserve the system for future generations, Medicare needs to be reined in, means-tested and trimmed down; some elements of Medicare need to be phased out altogether.

But those are non-starters, which means the Boomers’ kids and grandkids will work longer and receive a far smaller return on their “investment” in Social Security and Medicare. Again, Marche offers helpful evidence in this regard: He notes that a wealthy retired couple today will pay $899,000 into programs like Medicare and Social Security and receive $1.01 million in benefits; a low-earning retired couple today will pay $510,000 into the system and get $821,000 back. Post-Boomer generations won’t see anything like this.

Indeed, it could be argued that the spending and debt debates in today’s Washington are basically debates over how much the Boomers will take from their children and grandchildren.

If those are some of the public-policy consequences of Baby Boomer selfishness, what are the causes?

Ronald Reagan offered an answer way back in 1967. Speaking to a gathering of young Baby Boomers at Eureka College, he concluded that his generation had given his children’s generation—the Boomers—too much. “Because we had to earn,” he explained, “we wanted to give…‘No’ was either a dirty word or dropped from our vocabulary.” He lamented that “our motives have been laudable, but our judgment has been bad…I am afraid we shortchanged you on responsibilities.”

The words may sting, but they proved prescient.

“No” and “responsibility”—with all their limiting power—are words that too many Boomers have never understood, grasped or used.

Just contrast the Boomers with their parents.

Recall that in announcing his decision to intervene in Libya (by bombing Qaddafi’s forces), the president declared, “We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy, and his forces step up their assaults on cities…where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government.”

That sounds like a fairly accurate description of Syria. Yet this time around, there’s no help on the way for the rebels—at least not from Obama. Instead of a Libya-style air war, Obama’s reaction to Syria is beginning to look a lot like Washington’s non-response to the mangling of Bosnia almost two decades ago. As Senator Joe Lieberman recently observed, “I feel like we are reliving history.”

When Yugoslavia began to descend into civil war in 1992, Western Europe seized upon the crisis as an opportunity to prove it was ready to keep the peace. It was, as one European diplomat famously declared, “the hour of Europe.”

Washington took the hint and stepped aside. It would be a fateful decision. Europe’s confidence in itself and in the UN was badly misplaced. As historian William Pfaff notes in The Wrath of Nations, “In the Bosnian crisis, the United States didn’t act, so everyone failed to act.” He argues that international organizations like the United Nations “proved an obstacle to action, by inhibiting individual national action and rationalizing the refusal to act nationally.”

The result: some 200,000 dead and millions of refugees.

As a candidate, then-Governor Bill Clinton had promised to end the bloodletting by arming the outgunned Bosnian Muslims and striking Serb artillery with U.S. airpower. But before he could take any such action as president, Clinton was blindsided by Somalia. And so, the slow-motion genocide continued for 31 months under Clinton.

The low point came when Dutch peacekeepers in the laughably misnamed UN Protection Force allowed Serb militiamen to enter the so-called safe haven of Srebrenica and liquidate 7,000 Bosnian men and boys. It was a microcosm of the entire war: The Serbs were by and large the aggressors, the Muslims were outgunned and thus easy prey, the UN was worthless, the Europeans were helpless, and the Americans were absent.

One caveat: Platforms are less important today than they used to be. While in the past, presidential candidates tended to reflect the party’s stances, modern presidential candidates tend to shape the party’s stances.

That said, platforms are still important in that they reveal what a party and its standard-bearer believe. In rummaging through winning GOP platforms dating back to 1860, a handful of large, enduring, recurring themes emerge.

Economic Freedom over Statism

The winning platforms of the past emphasize the importance freedom—and especially freedom from onerous and confiscatory taxation.

The 1924 platform, for instance, called for “progressive reduction of taxes of all the people.”

Parts of the 1952 platform could be used in the 2012 platform verbatim: “The administration has praised free enterprise while actually wrecking it. Here a little, there a little, year by year, it has sought to curb, regulate, harass, restrain and punish…Neither small nor large business can flourish in such an atmosphere.”

The 1968 platform urged “an expanding free enterprise system to provide jobs” and condemned the incumbent’s “economic mismanagement of the highest order.”

That charge certainly hits the mark in 2012. Compared to President Obama, LBJ looks like a miserly accountant. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, President Obama’s term includes the highest spending years since 1946. During President Obama’s term, Washington has added $5 trillion in debt.

Noting that “private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty,” the 1980 platform derided the federal government as “an aggressive enemy of the human right to private property ownership.”

Again, that charge is just as true today—and so is the remedy put forth in 1980. “Our foremost goal here at home is simple: economic growth and full employment without inflation,” Reagan’s platform-writers explained.

In 1952, the platform concluded that Washington had “deprived our citizens of precious liberties by seizing powers…hampered progress by unnecessary and crushing taxation…violated our liberties by turning loose upon the country a swarm of arrogant bureaucrats.” That sounds exactly like the sentiment that unleashed the Tea Party in 2009 and then triggered the historic midterm chastening in 2010.

The 1980 platform made a “case for the individual” and offered an indictment of statism: “They believe that every time new problems arise beyond the power of men and women as individuals to solve, it becomes the duty of government to solve them, as if there were never any alternative…Our case for the individual is stronger than ever.”

A Rejection of Government Control 

Of course, liberty is about far more than property rights and taxation. “Because we treasure freedom of conscience,” the 2000 platform vowed, “we oppose attempts to compel individuals or institutions to violate their moral standards in providing health-related services…We oppose using public revenues for abortion and will not fund organizations which advocate it.”

That brings us to today’s debate over nationalized healthcare and the spinoff debate over ObamaCare’s alarming encroachment on religious liberty.

The president’s healthcare law required all employers offering health insurance to include coverage for “preventive health services.” HHS later defined this to include contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs like the morning-after pill. Many observers hoped the president would direct HHS to provide a broad exemption for religious employers—and for good reason: In 2009, the president spoke eloquently about the need to “honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion” and said he was open to “a sensible conscience clause.”

But those hopes were dashed, as we now know. HHS initially exempted only those organizations that employ people of the same faith, serve people of the same faith and focus on religious teaching as their main mission. Universities, primary and secondary schools, hospitals, nursing homes, food kitchens and virtually all religious charitable organizations would not receive a conscience-clause exemption from HHS, which explains the firestorm that erupted in January.

“This is first and foremost a matter of religious liberty for all,” Cardinal Dolan explained. “If the government can, for example, tell Catholics that they cannot be in the insurance business today without violating their religious convictions, where does it end?”

Dolan wasn’t the only religious leader to come to that conclusion. The National Association of Evangelicals, Southern Baptist Convention, LutheranChurch (Missouri Synod) and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America have all condemned the ruling. Federal lawsuits have been filed by numerous religious employers.

Reacting to the backlash, the president proposed a compromise that would allow religious employers not to include contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs in their health-insurance plan as long as they make sure their employees have insurance alternatives that provide contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and the like. The White House also offered “a one-year transition period for religious organizations while this policy is being implemented.”

These are not winning strategies against President Obama. Instead, it’s time to make—and keep—the message simple by focusing on three lines of attack.

Energy

On Inauguration Day, a gallon of gas cost $1.81. Today, the AAA national average is $3.70 per gallon. Industry experts predict $5-per-gallon gas in the near future.

Since the stuff that will power the U.S. economy after oil is simply not yet ready to shoulder the burden, the two-track goal should be maximum development of domestic oil reserves to enable America to reconfigure its supply base in the near term, and investments today in tomorrow’s “post-petro economy.”

Yet there’s been little more than talk from the president about jumpstarting nuclear energy, and an ocean of domestic oil remains untapped because of the president’s politics.

For instance, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that the Arctic may hold 90 billion barrels of oil. About a third of the oil is in Alaskan territory. But the EPA is using its power over air permits to block new drilling in Alaska. (The president’s EPA also handed down a regulation requiring coal plants in 27 states to cut emissions. The result is a tax on coal.) RAND estimates that Colorado, Utah and Wyoming sit atop a goldmine of oil-shale deposits. These states hold between 500 billion and 1.1 trillion recoverable barrels—the equivalent of three times the amount of oil in Saudi Arabia, according to an AP report. Already, the Canadian province of Alberta is converting its oil sands into 1.31 million barrels of oil per day. But the environmental lobby is staunchly opposed to oil sands and oil shale, which helps explain why the president opposed the Keystone XL pipeline extension (it would have carried oil derived from oil sands in Canada) and why his administration has reduced the acreage set aside for oil-shale development in the U.S. from 2 million to 462,000.

The GOP nominee should press this case and let voters decide if they want to join the president in chasing after a mirage of sun-powered cars and windmill-powered houses, or if they want more oil from the U.S. and Canada—and cheaper energy as a result.

Spending

As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, President Obama’s term includes the highest spending years since 1946. During President Obama’s term, Washington has added $5 trillion in debt. The federal government has spent more than 24 percent of GDP in each of President Obama’s years in the White House, far above the historic average of 20 percent. And each and every year he has been in office, President Obama has carried a deficit above $1 trillion—an unprecedented feat.

To achieve that dubious record, the president wasted $862 billion on a stimulus that stimulated nothing but the government sector. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the stimulus package “increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 2.8 million.” At $862 billion, 2.8 million jobs is not a very good return on investment.

The president spawned a $1-trillion healthcare behemoth that will surely grow bigger than his actuaries predict. Even in good economic times, even for a country with its fiscal house in order, launching such a large-scale program would be a dicey proposition. But to do so in the midst of the worst economy in 30 years—a year after adding an unprecedented $1.4 trillion in deficit spending to an already-massive national debt—was downright dangerous.

The drag ObamaCare will place on the economy is only now coming into focus. The CBO projects that the IRS will need 17,000 new employees to enforce elements of the healthcare law. The president’s healthcare takeover creates 159 new sub-agencies, committees, bureaus and commissions, each with a regulatory role. All told, according to a Washington Post analysis, between 100,000 and 250,000 new government employees are needed to meet the growing demands of President Obama’s supersized government.

Given that Washington found a way to grow by 25 percent during the Age of Obama, a simple, straightforward proposal by the GOP nominee to return spending to 2008 levels would make good economic sense and would seem eminently sensible to most voters.

Another idea the GOP nominee should explore is embracing the recommendations of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which was created by President Obama. After the blue-ribbon panel offered several solutions to Washington’s fiscal crisis, the president promptly tossed them in the circular file. One is left to wonder why the president wasted time and political capital appointing the commission in the first place. That’s a question the GOP nominee should ask—and ask often. Imagine this line of attack: “The president ignored his own commission’s recommendations to rein in spending. I will turn those recommendations into law and turn our nation’s disastrous fiscal situation around. Barack Obama talked about our fiscal crisis. I will do something about it.”

While on the subject of fiscal responsibility, the nominee should point out how reckless the president has been about defense spending. The reality is that the Armed Forces are not to blame for the budget-deficit mess. As then-Defense Secretary Gates warned in one of his last addresses, “I have long believed—and I still do—that the defense budget, however large it may be, is not the cause of this country’s fiscal woes….When President Eisenhower warned of the ‘Military Industrial Complex’ in 1961, defense consumed more than half the federal budget, and the portion of the nation’s economic output devoted to the military was about 9 percent. By comparison, this year’s base defense budget…represents less than 15 percent of all federal spending and equates to roughly three and a half percent of GDP.”

Not long ago, I used this space to ask if the Arab Spring was like 2009 (the failed Twitter Revolution in Iran), 1989 (the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe) or 1979 (the Islamist revolution in Iran). Like others, I believed the end of Mubarak’s autocratic rule was something to celebrate, but I worried that what ultimately replaces Mubarak may not be worth celebrating. And sadly, a year later, elements of the Arab Spring are starting to resemble 1979, as evidenced by the brewing hostage crisis in Egypt.

Nineteen American citizens working for well-known and well-established nonprofit groups are being held on trumped-up charges that they tried to destabilize Egypt. Their offices were raided in late December, some are holed up in the U.S. embassy and all of them have been barred from flying out of Egypt. As Time magazine notes, December is significant. December is when Congress passed a number of conditions for aid to the Egyptian military, including proving a “commitment to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, progress toward democratic reforms, and the protection of free expression, association and religion.” Not only are the last two of those conditions not being met by Egypt, but Time adds that Cairo’s case against the Americans is “propagated by the military-led regime.”

That’s also an important part of the story. To its credit, the Egyptian military played a key role in persuading Mubarak to cede power, and in preventing Egypt from careening into chaos. The Egyptian military is now trying to serve as something of a referee/power broker/king-maker. Up until this crisis, Washington recognized that while having the Egyptian military in charge is not ideal, it may be necessary to hold the political pieces together in Egypt. But if this is how the “responsible” parties in post-Mubarak Egypt are going to treat Americans, then it’s time to reevaluate everything about this interests-based relationship. Hopefully, Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey is conveying that very message in his talks in Cairo.

The clear, unambiguous and indeed private message should be threefold:

• The U.S. aid spigot—an average of $2 billion per year since 1979—will be shut off if these hostages aren’t freed and if post-Mubarak Egypt continues to resemble post-Shah Iran. As Time puts it, “if Egypt’s generals get away with the NGO crackdown and the political humiliation of its biggest foreign benefactor, it’s going to set a dangerous precedent for other regimes testing the waters of democracy.”

• The United States is prepared to radically rethink its security posture and force structure in the region. There are many other countries in the region that will take U.S. aid dollars and assist the U.S. in protecting its strategic interests.

• U.S. force will be employed if American interests or citizens are again threatened. Washington cannot allow another far-off revolution to hold America hostage.

Floating a trial balloon for the White House, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced last week that the Obama administration is planning to speed up its withdrawal timetable in Afghanistan. “By mid- to the latter part of 2013, we’ll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role,” Panetta said. That would be a year earlier than what the Obama administration had initially proposed.

This should come as no surprise. In fact, it’s exactly what President Obama has been pushing for, itching for, advocating, from the very beginning of his administration.

Recall that in 2009, after a lengthy re-review of his own policy, the president concluded that “it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan,” before promising that “after 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”

That announcement raised red flags for many observers.

First, the notion that “our vital national interest” somehow has an expiration date was nothing short of bizarre.

Second, the much-ballyhooed surge of 30,000 troops was less than what the generals asked for—Gen. Stanley McChrystal wanted 40,000—and arguably never had the full impact it was designed to have. In fact, the White House was trying to get the military to accede to a faster draw-down—and arguably shorter withdrawal timetable—last July.

As Defense News reported at the time, then-Defense Secretary Gates was “sparring at a distance with White House aides who are pushing for a faster draw-down of the 100,000-strong U.S. force.” Indeed, after the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the president declared that “it’s now time for us to recognize that we’ve accomplished a big chunk of our mission and that it’s time for Afghans to take more responsibility.” He then ordered the withdrawal of 33,000 troops by summer 2012. Again, the military advocated a more modest reduction of between 5,000 and 10,000 troops.

Third, letting the Taliban know when the U.S. military would end its offensive only made the mission harder—and the Taliban less open to some sort of settlement.

That helps explain why a leaked U.S. military report, based on interviews of Taliban prisoners, concludes that:

“Taliban commanders, along with rank and file members, increasingly believe their control of Afghanistan is inevitable. Though the Taliban suffered severely in 2011, its strength, motivation, funding and tactical proficiency remains intact…they see little hope for a negotiated peace. Despite numerous tactical setbacks, surrender is far from their collective mindset.”

Regrettably, it seems the very opposite mindset is at work in Washington.

To be sure, the American people and their military should not be expected to sacrifice more for Afghanistan than the Afghan people are themselves willing to sacrifice. Moreover, it is the president’s responsibility to determine and then to do what is in America’s national interest—not what is in Hamid Karzai’s interest. In other words, sometimes the wisest, most just, most appropriate decision a president can make is to pull back and turn away.

President Obama’s pals in the media are at it again, this time cheering Team Obama’s command of the latest technology. One outlet is entranced by the Obama campaign’s use of Google+ to conduct “the first completely digital interview from the White House.” A mobile technology news site declares that “President Obama’s decision to use Google+” and “embrace of social media…enhances his reputation as a tech-savvy commander-in-chief.” Another media outlet gushes that the Obama campaign represents “the first national political adoption” of mobile credit card readers. Yet another marvels at how “President Obama has Twittered, Googled and Facebooked millions of American voters.” Fast Company expects Team Obama “to storm into new digital territory in the upcoming race,” thanks to the Obama campaign’s hiring of “uber-hipster and tech rebel Harper Reed as the organization’s chief technology officer.” Calling Obama “the Google-style candidate,” The Financial Times adds, with a sense of fait accompli, “Mr. Obama’s campaign Facebook page already has 24m friends.” Translation: Why even bother trying to challenge our tech-savvy, with-it, and above-all, hip commander-in-chief?

This all calls to mind some of the nonsense said early in the Age of Obama.

A Computer Weekly column, for instance, praised “Obama’s technology presidency,” declared the new president a “technology-savvy leader” and applauded Obama for “leadership by example” in the area of information technology.

Perhaps worst of all was a piece penned by Anna Quindlen mocking John McCain because he “doesn’t text-message or have a BlackBerry or use e-mail.” The next president of the United States needs to be a “techie,” she declared, because “Americans cannot afford” a president who is “out of it”—and because America’s national security depends on it. “If Osama bin Laden beat us with a laptop,” Quindlen queried, “shouldn’t we at least have a president who is reasonably conversant with one?”

The short answer was then—and remains today: “Not necessarily.” Being a “techie” is not a prerequisite for being president.

By Quindlen’s logic—and the logic of her media brethren who confuse technological acumen with governing competence—presidents should have a working knowledge of everything that the U.S. government and its enemies use to pursue their respective objectives, as well as everything average Americans use in their daily lives. Of course, we know that’s not possible or necessary.

It was officially called the State of the Union Address, but what President Obama actually delivered on Tuesday night was a campaign speech targeted directly at his base. The message went something like this: “Unions, environmentalists, teachers, Hispanic immigrants, women, I’m your president…I’m your candidate.”

Consider the code words and messages sprinkled throughout the speech.

The president began with a shameless signal to the Code Pink crowd and anti-war left—the folks who fueled his rise and run for the White House. “For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq,” he declared, sidestepping the unraveling situation that has emerged as a result. And he went on: “We’ve begun to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Ten thousand of our troops have come home. Twenty-three thousand more will leave by the end of this summer.” Again, never mind what is left behind.

For Big Labor, he boasted about his efforts to get “workers and automakers to settle their differences” and get a government-owned, union-run General Motors “back on top as the world’s number one automaker.”

He gratuitously mentioned a “unionized plant in Milwaukee” and cited key union cities in key states for good measure: “Detroit and Toledo and Chicago…Cleveland and Pittsburgh.”

For the teachers’ unions, he lamented how “tight budgets have forced states to lay off thousands of teachers” and called on Congress to give states “the resources to keep good teachers on the job.” Drifting into meaningless platitudes, he promised that in exchange he would support programs to “replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.”

While on the subject of meaningless platitudes, the president boasted that “there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office.” The reason for that, of course, is that he’s presiding over the worst economy in four decades. In other words, there are no jobs to entice immigrants to cross America’s southern border—legally or illegally. (See Mitch Daniels’ sparkling rebuttal for more on why.)

But the president’s main message on immigration was for the amnesty lobby: “Hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation,” he chided. “Let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people,” who, it pays to recall, are not responsible enough to legalize their status.

Worried about aggravating Iran, the United States has announced that it is postponing missile-defense drills with Israel. Dubbed “Austere Challenge 12,” the exercises had been planned for months and were intended to send a clear message that the United States and Israel were prepared to protect themselves from Iran’s mushrooming missile threat. In fact, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last month pointed to the exercises as evidence of America’s “unshakable” commitment to Israel. Now that the exercises have been delayed, the mullahs are getting a very different message.

A U.S. European Command official assures us that “It is not unusual for such exercises to be postponed,” which is true. But timing is everything when dealing with aggressors. Washington’s intentions are good—to avert an accidental war—but the perception in Tehran is that Washington blinked. That means the mullahs won this round. And as with all aggressors, that emboldens them and encourages them to push harder, to take more risks and to make dangerous miscalculations that invite the very thing Washington is trying to avoid.

One recalls how the Carter administration reacted to Moammar Qaddafi’s unilateral claim over the Gulf of Sidra, a huge chunk of the Mediterranean Sea universally considered as international waters. Anyone who crossed Qaddafi’s so-called “line of death” in the Gulf of Sidra would face military attack. President Carter canceled annual freedom-of-navigation naval exercises in and around the Gulf of Sidra to avoid confrontation and to keep things calm in the region.

But the message Qaddafi heard was that America was weak, and so he pushed and miscalculated. U.S. intelligence soon unearthed evidence that Libyan agents were planning to hit Marine One with a heat-seeking missile; Libya was caught red-handed sending tons of military hardware to communist forces in Nicaragua; and Qaddafi’s army of terrorists was at work all around the globe.

Vowing to enforce the principle of freedom of the seas, President Reagan ordered the U.S. Sixth Fleet to resume its exercises. When the exercises began in the autumn of 1981, Qaddafi lived up to his word and sent several warplanes into international airspace to enforce his line of death. Authorized, in Reagan’s words, to pursue attacking Libyan warplanes “all the way into the hangar,” U.S. F-14s responded with deadly force and made it clear to Qaddafi that there would be no payoff for recklessly disregarding international norms—only costs. “We sent a message to Qaddafi,” Reagan said. “We weren’t going to allow him to declare squatter’s rights over a huge area of the Mediterranean in defiance of international law.”

The moral of the story is that in international relations, every action and non-action sends a message. The postponement of Austere Challenge 12 sends the wrong message. Just when the pressure was building on the mullahs—on the economic front, in the Strait of Hormuz, vis-à-vis European energy imports, at the IAEA—Washington put Austere Challenge 12 on hold and relieved the pressure.

It’s important to note that these U.S.-Israel exercises were wholly defensive. As The Washington Post reports, they were “designed to test multiple Israeli and U.S. air defense systems against incoming missiles and rockets.”

Think about that. These weren’t provocative naval maneuvers off Iran’s coast or massive air exercises feigning attacks across the skies of the Middle East. These were missile-defense exercises designed to test U.S.-Israeli forces in deflecting inbound missile threats.

Defense is the operative word here. To cut through all the relativistic confusion, consider this everyday example: Which one of the following would you call provocative—a cop strapping on a bullet-proof vest or a gunman loading his weapon?

Declaring that the U.S. military and the nation it defends are at a “moment of transition,” President Barack Obama has unveiled a dramatic scaling-back of the military’s role, reach and resources—complete with troop reductions, force redeployments and a promise to refocus on economic challenges. Or as he indelicately put it last year, “time to focus on nation-building at home.” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta calls it a “strategic turning point.” Indeed it is. We are left to wonder just what the United States is turning toward—or into.

In his remarks at the Pentagon last week, Obama called America “the greatest force for freedom and security that the world has ever known.” He’s right about that, but what he doesn’t seem to understand—as evidenced by his sweeping strategic review and retrenchment—is that being a global force for freedom and security is not preordained or written in the stars. Rather, it is a role that requires treasure and effort and sacrifice.

The American people may be ready to give up this thankless job, but that seems doubtful. At the very least, the president needs to make sure they understand what these changes will mean. As Robert Gates warned before he left the Pentagon, perhaps aware of what Obama was planning:

If we are going to reduce the resources and the size of the U.S. military…people need to make conscious choices about what the implications are for the security of the country, as well as for the variety of military operations we have around the world, if lower priority missions are scaled back or eliminated…The tough choices ahead are really about the kind of role the American people—accustomed to unquestioned military dominance for the past two decades—want their country to play in the world.

In other words, there’s a price to maintaining a peerless power-projecting military, but there’s also a price to not doing so.

Speaking of price tags, the reason the president unveiled his plan for a “leaner” military, at least ostensibly, is that Congress, concerned about unprecedented debt and deficits, mandated massive reductions in defense spending—some $500 billion in reductions as compared with what had been projected.

“Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow,” Obama explained, “but the fact of the matter is this:  It will still grow.” In other words, the president is saying defense spending will grow at a slower rate. That’s a fair point: Slower growth should not be considered a cut. But why don’t the president and his political brethren apply the same logic to social programs? If these aren’t really cuts the president is proposing for the Pentagon, then it’s not really a cut when a reform-minded congressman proposes to slow the rate of growth in, say, Medicare or Social Security or the EPA.

Of course, the reality is that the Armed Forces are not to blame for this budget-deficit mess. We could eliminate the entire defense budget—$662 billion this year—and turn the Pentagon into a mega-mall, and we would still face a budget deficit of $700 billion. (The current deficit is in the $1.3-trillion range.)

The heart of the problem is runaway spending on Social Security, Medicare, stimulus boondoggles and the like. Yet Social Security and other entitlements are simply not as important as national security. After all, our founding document calls on the government to “provide for the common defense” in the very first sentence; then grants Congress the power to declare war, “raise and support armies…provide and maintain a navy…make rules for calling forth the militia…provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the militia”; authorizes the president to serve as “commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states”; discusses war, treason and America’s enemies in Article III; and emphasizes the importance of a “well-regulated militia” to the “security of a free state” in the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, the Constitution says nothing about retirement pensions, stimulus programs or health care. The Founders understood that if their new government didn’t provide for the common defense, it wouldn’t be able to provide anything else—and the American people wouldn’t be able to live free, let alone pursue happiness.

But back to the president’s plan for a smaller military. Today’s U.S. military, as the president explained, has “decimated al Qaeda’s leadership…delivered justice to Osama bin Laden…put that terrorist network on the path to defeat…made important progress in Afghanistan…joined allies and partners to protect the Libyan people as they ended the regime of Muammar Qaddafi”—all while defending Europe and the Pacific and the homeland.

Tehran is making lots of noise about closing the Strait of Hormuz, boasting that it would be “easier than drinking a glass of water,” according to Iran’s naval chief, and warning U.S. aircraft carriers to steer clear of the vital waterway. The Iranians have punctuated their threats with missile tests, naval maneuvers and other provocative acts. What if the president responded by explaining that closure of the Strait of Hormuz “would constitute an illegal interference with navigation of the sea,” by making it unambiguously clear to Iran’s leaders that “we will protect our ships, and if they threaten us, they’ll pay a price,” and by deploying and even using military force to ensure that Tehran had “no illusions about the cost of irresponsible behavior”?

As a matter of fact, the president has already responded to Iranian provocations in this manner. Of course, the president who did so was Ronald Reagan.

It happened in 1987-88, after Iran launched cruise missiles at ships in the Persian Gulf, attacked unarmed oil tankers, laid mines that destroyed cargo ships, harassed U.S. warships and aircraft deployed to ensure freedom of the seas, and deployed ship-killing missiles on its side of the Strait of Hormuz.

After an Iranian mine ripped through a U.S. warship, Reagan had enough and ordered a series of punishing military responses against Iranian naval assets all across the lower half of the Persian Gulf. While most Americans forget this war on the Gulf, Tehran doesn’t. On a single day in 1988, the U.S. crippled Iran’s navy: U.S. helicopters disabled and then captured an Iranian ship; U.S. warships set Iranian oil platforms ablaze; and the U.S. armada eliminated six Iranian warships, effectively turning Iran’s military into a land-only force. Even the New York Times called it “The right response to Khomeini.”

Today, Tehran is even more capable of wreaking havoc in and around the Strait of Hormuz. Military analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Security and International Studies has noted that “Iran has given modernization of its naval forces high priority,” acquiring sophisticated anti-ship missiles from China and Ukraine, submarines from Russia, high-speed attack boats from France and an arsenal of some 2,000 mines. In Cordesman’s view, Iran may have the “potential capability to close the Gulf until U.S. naval and air power could clear the mines and destroy the missile launchers and submarines.”

Although now may not be the time for Reaganesque military action against Iran’s navy, it’s certainly the time for Reaganesque words from this president. All we’ve heard so far in response to Iran’s threatened closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a brief but blunt warning from the U.S. Fifth Fleet that disruptions of the vital transit route “will not be tolerated.”

“North Korea as we know it is over,” according to Victor Cha, Asian affairs specialist to President George W. Bush from 2004 to 2007. “Whether it comes apart in the next few weeks or over several months, the regime will not be able to hold together after the untimely death of its leader, Kim Jong-il.”

For the sake of discussion, let’s stipulate that Cha is correct. If the Kim Dynasty’s days are indeed numbered, what will the end look like?

History offers some helpful, if not always uplifting, examples of how North Korea could collapse.

The ideal parallels—the economic liberalization of China and the bloodless reunification of East and West Germany—also seem the least likely.

The prospect of North Korea following China into quasi-capitalism seems remote, at least for now. This is a closed society, an economy smaller than virtually every state in the U.S., a country whose most lucrative exports are retrofitted Soviet-era missiles and counterfeit $100 bills, a place where citizens are required to donate food to the armed forces.

But as Ralph Cossa of the Center for Strategic and International Studies observes, “There appears to be some hope, primarily emanating from Beijing, that Kim Jong-un will take North Korea down the path of Chinese-style reform.”

One way, perhaps the only way, this could happen is if China decides to intervene directly in North Korea’s economic and political system. Given Beijing’s keen interest in preventing the sort of collapse in North Korea that would either a) invite intervention by South Korea and the U.S. on humanitarian or self-defense grounds or b) trigger a confrontation enfolding some of the most powerful militaries on earth, such interference by Beijing would not be unthinkable. Neither would it be unprecedented. In fact, it arguably would be akin to an economic version of China’s late-1950 invasion across the Yalu, which aimed to prevent a U.S. takeover of the North.

Cha notes that Beijing could, in effect, “adopt [North Korea] as a province” by offering massive aid and assistance packages conditioned on the younger Kim’s “promises of economic reform.” This could stave off the sort of dramatic, near-term change that so worries Beijing.

As to the German-reunification scenario, it pays to recall that North and South Koreans, quite unlike East and West Germans, fought each other in a brutal war, which means they bear scars and wounds that pre-unification Germans did not. Plus, for East Germans, there was no “Great Successor” to worship. By 1989, even the true believers understood that the communist state was dead. This is not the case in North Korea, where the people are completely isolated from the outside world—and totally controlled by a propaganda machine that deifies the regime. Witness the mass-mourning by the North Korean people—all for a brutal tyrant who starved them.

In other words, North Koreans don’t appear to have the will or the wherewithal—or quite simply the strength, given a diet that relies on grass as a staple—to tear down the Kim Dynasty. So, a “Pyongyang Spring” seems unlikely. And even if there is some germ of a freedom movement in North Korea—some North Korean Havel ready to speak truth to power—it’s difficult to imagine the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) remaining garrisoned like the armies of the Soviet bloc in 1989, 1990 and 1991, if the younger Kim ever calls for help. The NKPA is the most paranoid, propagandized and privileged part of North Korea. Why wouldn’t it try to sustain the regime? Why wouldn’t it turn against its own countrymen?

“The next president of the United States is not going to have to address the issue as to whether we went into Iraq or not,” Sen. John McCain explained in 2008. “The next president of the United States is going to have to decide how we leave, when we leave and what we leave behind.”

President Obama, as we now know, decided to leave Iraq rather abruptly—and to leave behind a fragile, unfinished country. As Iraq limps into the unknown, many dangers and questions await. Because U.S. troops are in Kuwait or back in the states, Iraq will face those dangers alone and Washington will have little say in how those questions are addressed.

The debates over whether President Bush should have launched the war and over how President Obama ended it will go on for many years. Perhaps someday a consensus will emerge. But perhaps it won’t. It pays to recall that 36 years after the fall of Saigon, Americans are still debating the war in Vietnam.

Suffice it to say here that President Bush, after receiving approval from the Senate (77-23) and the House (296-133), ordered U.S. forces to take down Saddam Hussein’s regime because September 11 changed the very DNA of U.S. national-security policy. “Any administration in such a crisis,” as historian John Lewis Gaddis concludes in Surprise, Security and the American Experience, “would have had to rethink what it thought it knew about security and hence strategy.” Was deterrence any longer possible? Was containment viable? Was giving repeat-offenders like Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt responsible?

One by one, the Bush administration—and large, bipartisan majorities in Congress—answered those questions. And the answer to each was “no,” which is why September 11 led first to Afghanistan and then to Baghdad. This is perhaps the most fundamental way that September 11 is linked to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: The latter did not plan or hatch the former, but the former taught Washington a lesson about the danger of failing to confront threats before they are fully formed. In the same manner, the appeasement of Hitler at Munich at once had nothing and everything to do with how America responded to Stalin and his successors during the Cold War.

As for President Obama’s decision to let Iraq stand or fall on its own, it should come as no surprise. It pays to recall that the centerpiece of President Obama’s foreign policy—indeed the very fuel for his White House run—was always withdrawing from Iraq. If nothing else, he deserves credit for keeping his word.

Of course, when it comes to national security, inconsistency would be preferable to instability—especially in the Persian Gulf.

“Our forces are good,” according to Col. Salam Khaled of the Iraqi army, “but not to a sufficient degree that allows them to face external and internal challenges alone. The loyalty of forces is not to their homeland. The loyalty is to the political parties and to the sects.”

It’s interesting how those who rail against Wall Street greed—or the greed of the faceless, nameless “They”—usually overlook the greed of those on Main Street. President Obama is a case in point.

During his speech earlier this month, at a high school in rural Kansas, Obama inveighed against “the breathtaking greed of a few” who “plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we’re still fighting to recover.”

As Obama tells it, those greedy few sold mortgages “to people who couldn’t afford them, or even sometimes understand them.” Then, “banks and investors” pocketed “huge bonuses made with other people’s money on the line.”

All the while, those of us on Main Street—guileless and good and anything but greedy—relied on “credit cards and home equity loans” to get by. As a result, according to the president, “too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt.”

In short, Obama focuses his ire and wags his scolding finger at “banks and investors,” while giving the rest of us a pass.

To be sure, greed motivated the people who run the banks and mortgage houses and credit card companies—and still does. But didn’t greed also motivate those who bought houses and took on mortgages they “couldn’t afford”? Didn’t greed motivate some of those who used credit cards and home equity lines to live way beyond their means?

Indeed, Americans may deride deficit spending, but Washington is merely imitating us. Americans hold some $900 billion in credit-card debt, and according to the financial-data clearinghouse Bankrate, four out 10 American families spend more than they earn annually.

One contributing factor in this is greed, and it has nothing to do with Wall Street.

Likewise, we may say we oppose big government, but we are fond of particular government programs:

• The new healthcare law may be unpopular today. But in 2009, polls revealed that 75 percent of the country supported universal coverage.

• In 1997, 33 percent of undergraduates borrowed easy money through the federal student loan program. By 2007, that number was 42 percent. With the recent federal takeover of student loans, that percentage will explode.

• According to a federal report unearthed by The Atlantic, “The share of personal income that comes from government-transfer programs” has grown from 5.9 cents of every dollar in 1950 to 17.3 cents in 2009.

Forty percent of Republican voters say they are dissatisfied with the GOP presidential field. Perhaps the reason for this, as Ross Douthat observed in a recent piece, is that it’s difficult to imagine any of the current crop of candidates as the Republican nominee—perhaps aside from Mitt Romney. And yet many conservatives have concerns about Romney, who can’t seem to break 25 percent in the polls. Thus, a carousel of candidates has taken turns matching Romney’s poll numbers, each keeping pace with the former Massachusetts governor for a couple weeks before falling back in the pack. In Douthat’s estimation, the problem is that many of the contestants don’t come across as particularly presidential. Some lack eloquence. Others lack experience. Still others are so one-dimensional or issue-specific that the prospect that they could win the nomination and challenge Obama for the presidency is beyond remote. Douthat may be onto something.

Just compare the current GOP field—and their resumes—to that of past contested primaries.

The leading names in today’s field include Romney, whose resume is certainly of presidential caliber but whose record of “evolving” on key issues—health care and abortion top the list—is unsettling to GOP conservatives. There’s former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, whose big ideas triggered a political revolution in 1994 but whose personal baggage is unsettling to GOP evangelicals. There’s Herman Cain, a restaurant CEO with perhaps more personal baggage than Gingrich and far less political experience than any other candidate; in fact, Cain has never been elected to office, which is unsettling to GOP establishment types. At the other end of the spectrum is Jon Huntsman, who knows all about the world, has a weighty political resume, lacks any personal baggage but served as Barack Obama’s ambassador to China, which is beyond unsettling to the GOP’s base. There’s Rick Perry, a popular governor with lots of question marks about his discipline, capacity to wage and win a national campaign and ability to attract independents next fall, all of which is unsettling to the GOP’s anybody-but-Obama caucus. And then there’s Ron Paul, a maverick congressman who seems more eager to criticize his party than carry its standard in a general election, and Michele Bachmann, a three-term congresswoman.

Some of those resumes are as thin as, well, the 2008 Democratic nominee’s resume—and some of those candidates are carrying enough baggage to sink any head-to-head matchup with the current president.

Now, consider the resumes of the main Republican candidates from previous years.

Another month, another incident with Pakistan. This time, it was a nighttime NATO airstrike against Pakistani border outposts that triggered the crisis. Pakistan says 25 of its soldiers were killed in the “unprovoked and indiscriminate” attack by NATO helicopters. NATO has issued apologies for the “tragic unintended incident.” But Islamabad has promised to retaliate for what it views as an act of aggression. In fact, the Pakistanis already have shut down the overland supply corridors that carry NATO war materiel into Afghanistan from Pakistani ports. In addition, Islamabad has demanded that the U.S. pull out of bases being used to conduct drone strikes.

To be sure, this could be what it appears on the surface: a friendly-fire mistake caused by the fog of war. There’s a reason the term was coined by the warriors of yesterday. Battle is chaos and confusion, especially at night.

Yet something tells me there’s more at play here than the fog of war.

As the Pakistani side rages about its innocent soldiers coming under attack while fighting our enemy, Afghan and NATO officials have made it clear that the helicopter strikes came in response to repeated fire from the Pakistani side of the border. More specifically, the fire came from “a Pakistan military outpost,” according to a Wall Street Journal report on the incident. That’s what triggered the NATO air attack, which, according to an Afghan official interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, “Pakistani officials were informed of…before it took place.”

This is nothing new. Pakistani forces have fired on U.S. and other NATO helicopters for years. Given that Taliban, Haqqani and al Qaeda forces have no helicopters, the Pakistanis cannot claim to be doing this by mistake.

Moreover, elements within the Pakistani security, military and intelligence apparatus—which helped create the Taliban in a short-sighted attempt to gain nominal control over Afghanistan—continue to support the Taliban and the Haqqani network. The Haqqani network, it pays to recall, has been involved in several terrorist attacks on civilians in Afghanistan (including the Kabul siege earlier this year) and in attacks on coalition troops.  In September, Adm. Mike Mullen called the Haqqani network “a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI).”

Haqqani operatives in Afghanistan, “with ISI support,” in Mullen’s words, have planned and conducted truck bomb attacks on U.S. and NATO bases, assaults on the U.S. embassy and deadly attacks on commercial and government facilities in Kabul. The ISI-backed Haqqani network was responsible for the 2009 attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan, which killed seven CIA operatives. According to the International Herald Tribune, ISI’s “S Wing” is coordinating Taliban operations in southern Afghanistan.

“The support of terrorism is part of their national strategy,” Mullen bluntly said of the dysfunctional, duplicitous Pakistani security, military and intelligence apparatus.

It’s been building for a decade. President George W. Bush warned that “The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions, and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons.” President Barack Obama has expressed worries about “the continuing threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program.” In 2009, a high-level U.S. intelligence official concluded that Iran could have a nuclear bomb in 2011. And now, that moment—the one so many dreaded and predicted and feared—appears to be at hand. Specifically, the latest IAEA report expresses “serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program,” concludes that Iran “has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device,” declares that there are “strong indicators of possible weapon development” and details a number of examples of overt and illegal efforts at weaponization, including: nuclear-bomb modeling, developing trigger devices and studying ways to fit nuclear payloads onto the Shahab-3 missile. As the Washington Post puts it, the IAEA has concluded that “Iran’s government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon.”

This helps explain the rush of diplomatic and military activity swirling around the Middle East.

In diplomatic circles, the IAEA report has been called “a game changer” by British officials.

In Israel, recent weeks have seen a flurry of very-public, very-choreographed signals: long-range missile tests; air maneuvers in Italy featuring what one Israeli newspaper describes as “lengthy, long-distance mission exercises”; and streams of worrisome words.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warns that “A nuclear Iran will be a dire threat to the Middle East and the entire world and…a direct and grave threat to us.”

There are suggestions by Defense Minister Ehud Barak that Israel has plans to strike Iran with or without U.S. support. It’s worth noting that Israel has taken unilateral preemptive action in self-defense many times: the 1967 war was a preemptive war; the strike on Iraq’s nuclear facilities at Osirak in 1981 was preemptive; the bombing raids on Syria’s nascent nuclear plant in 2007 were preemptive; and the mysterious Stuxnet cyber-attacks, purportedly carried out by a quiet coalition of American, Israeli and European intelligence agencies, were preemptive.

There are reports that Barak and Netanyahu are trying to win over a majority of the cabinet for a counter-proliferation strike. Barak has even discussed casualty figures, suggesting detailed war-gaming on Israel’s part.

President Shimon Peres speaks of a “ticking clock…there is not much time left.” The elder statesman says “Iran is nearing atomic weapons…What needs to be done must be done and there is a long list of options.”

Most of the options are military. The Guardian newspaper reports that “Britain’s armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran.” Not known for hyperbole or military cheerleading, the left-leaning paper cites military sources who say the U.S. and U.K. are planning “targeted missile strikes at some key Iranian facilities.” Information leaked to the Guardian sketches the outlines of a series of counter-proliferation strikes “predominantly waged from the air, with some naval involvement, using missiles such as the Tomahawks [and] a small number of special forces.”

The Arab world, too, seems genuinely concerned about Iran.