A World Without the United States

  I have a relative--a liberal lawyer, it's true but a valued friend--with whom I argue occasionally. One day he contended that the United States had no right to intervene in any country's workings, whether in pursuit of liberty or not. He spoke contemptuously of our involvement and nuclear capacity, saying we had no right to deny countries like Iran the nuclear bomb.
  This is a common attitude among my young liberal friends: they view the US as a power in decline, one whose best days are over and one who has no rights on a global scale. 
  In fact, a former boss said much the same thing in conversation, asking wonderingly why I would believe that the US had any leadership role internationally.
  So now we have a president who feels the same way. The United States has more obligation not even to increase wealth in this country, but rather to enjoin "fairness" through punishing the successful. 
  He and his ilk would rather protect a feeder fish like the Delta smelt than help the farmers in California.
  Iran, Syria and Egypt have young people desperately seeking liberty; now, the Ukraine.
  In between golfing, Obama has emerged to declare that those Ukrainians had better stop the violence or there will be "consequences." This isn't the first time he's threatened a "red line" which makes this situation only worse. The last time was Syria.
  From The Daily Caller:

After condemning the violence, the president made no bones about where the United States’ sympathy lay. “We hold the Ukrainian government primarily responsible for making sure it is dealing with peaceful protesters in an appropriate way,” he said, “that the Ukrainian people are able to assemble and speak freely about their interests without fear of repression.”

“And I want to be very clear that as we work through these next several days in Ukraine, we are going to be watching very carefully and we expect the Ukrainian government to show restraint, to not resort to violence when dealing with peaceful protesters,” he continued. “We’ve said that we also expect peaceful protesters to remain peaceful.

“And we’ll be monitoring very carefully the situation,” he added, “recognizing that, along with our international partners and the international community, there will be consequences if people step over the line.”

  An impotent president who wields a heavy hand of power domestically, Obama is pretty much unwilling to do anything but lamely and dismissively threaten vague consequences if bullies abroad don't do what Obama wants them to do.
  We seem to be witnessing what my Leftist friends have been envisioning for many years: a world without the United States.
  One problem appears to be that bullies don't seem to understand the nature of other bullies; I'm not suggesting that the US get militarily involved in any of these situations. There are other measures that could be taken.
  The truth is that Obama is a narcissistic bully who believes that, when ordered, people will naturally do what he wants because he said so. One can only imagine the grandparents who raised him, praising his every achievement, many of which seemed to center around smoking dope.
  One has to wonder if he's still doing that.