Like two speeding trains heading toward the same collapsed bridge, the dangers and failures of Barack Obama’s foreign, economic, and social policies are heading rapidly toward implosion. Our vital security interests, our economic well-being, our religious liberties, and the very fabric of American family life are all at grave risk of becoming casualties of the extreme ideological agenda and simple incompetence of the current administration.
First, with respect to foreign policy: Watching the spread of ISIS throughout the Middle East is like watching the growth of a cancer. Yet President Obama says he still has no fully-formed strategy with which to deal with it.
Instead, his focus has been on Iran, to which end he is encouraging Senate approval of a plan that would give Iran the continued capacity to produce nuclear weapons in coming years.
The irony is that Iran is the epicenter of Islamic terrorism. Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Shiite jihadism, the “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” and other violent Muslim extremist groups all find a base of support in Tehran. The idea that the United States would endorse a weak agreement with a power as dangerous as this is chilling.
Congress must demand a non-nuclear Iran because a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to Israel and other U.S. allies in the Middle East. Ultimately, an Iran with nuclear weapons is a threat to America, as well: Technology is such that a small nuclear device, made in Iran and distributed through its terror network, could reach our shores in suitcase.
Compounding this is that there is NO evidence the Iranian regime has made a strategic decision to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. And the regime’s track record on transparency is no better than the Obama administration’s. Past experience makes clear Iran cannot be trusted.
Additionally, Iran is emblematic of multiple failures in Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, from Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement that Russia will begin building more nuclear weapons to China’s resurgence. In the words of respected foreign policy expert Leslie Gelb, “the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy in the next two years.”
On the domestic front, things are no better. With respect the president’s most prized economic policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), millions of Americans have found it anything but affordable with their premiums rising an average of ten percent.
Now, Obamacare is headed for a constitutional collision. The Supreme Court is expected to rule against this administration in King v. Burwell. If the administration loses, and the subsidies are ruled unconstitutional, this will make Obamacare financially unobtainable for millions of hard-pressed Americans. According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums in the 34 states currently receiving federal Obamacare subsidies would see premiums rise by, minimally, 132 percent (Alaska) to as high as 650 percent (Mississippi).
The disruption caused by Obamacare’s likely collapse will only augment the president’s failure to address the impending collapse of our “entitlement” system of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The nation’s fiscal forecast, already ominously overcast, will become outright stormy if action is not taken, the sooner the better, to remedy our inescapable economic problems.
Then there’s the president’s apparently highest social policy goal, nationwide legalization of marriage between two same-gendered partners. If the Court endorses the Obama agenda redefining marriage the social and religious fallout will be immense. The disintegration of the intact biological family will accelerate and the religious liberties of tens of millions of Americans will be placed at risk. As his Solicitor General admitted during April’s same-sex “marriage” hearing before the Court, the tax exempt status of churches and religious colleges will be placed at risk if they don’t accommodate themselves to a newly-invented constitutional “right” for same-sex partners legally to marry.
Mr. Obama is steeped in a hard-left ideology so rigid that he seems immune to the political realities careening toward a very troubling collision that will affect all aspects of American life, now and in the years to come.
Tony Perkins is President of the Family Research Council(FRC). Ken Blackwell is a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a senior fellow at FRC.
