World ‘exploding’ — Obama offers ‘strategic patience’

His secretary of defense says “the world is exploding all over.” His attorney general says that the threat of terror “keeps me up at night.” The world bears them out. On Tuesday, American hostage Kayla Mueller is confirmed dead. On Wednesday, the U.S. evacuates its embassy in Yemen.

Yet President Barack Obama’s reaction to, shall we say, turmoil abroad has been one of alarming lassitude and passivity.

Russia pushes deep into eastern Ukraine. The Islamic State burns to death a Jordanian pilot. Iran extends its hegemony over Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and now Sanaa.

And America watches. Obama calls the policy “strategic patience.” That’s a synonym for “inaction.”

Take Russia. The only news out of Obama’s press conference with Angela Merkel this week was that he still can’t make up his mind whether to supply Ukraine with defensive weapons. The Russians have sent in T-80 tanks and Grad rocket launchers. We’ve sent in humanitarian aid that includes blankets and counselors.

How complementary: The counselors do grief therapy for those on the receiving end of the T-80 tank fire. And don’t forget the blankets. America was once the arsenal of democracy, notes Elliott Abrams. We are now its linen closet.

Why no anti-tank and other defensive weapons? Because we are afraid that arming the victim of aggression will anger the aggressor.

Such on-the-ground appeasement goes well with the linguistic appeasement whereby Obama dares not call radical Islam by name.

This passivity — strategic, syntactical, ideological — is more than just a reaction to the perceived overreach of the Bush years. It is rooted in Obama’s deep belief that we — America, Christians, the West — lack the moral authority to engage, to project, that is, to lead.

Before we condemn the atrocities of others, intoned Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast, we should acknowledge having authored the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, etc. “in the name of Christ.”

In a rare rhetorical feat, Obama managed to combine the banal and the repulsive. After all, is it really a revelation that all religions have transgressed? To the adolescent Columbia undergrad, that’s a profundity. To a roomful of faith leaders, that’s an insult to one’s intelligence.

Obama’s dismissal of the West’s moral standing is not new. It is just a reprise of his post-inauguration 2009 confessional world tour. From Strasbourg to Cairo and the United Nations, he indicted his own country, as I chronicled at the time, for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantánamo, for unilateralism, and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

The effect of such an indictment is to undermine any moral claim to American world leadership. Once you’ve discounted your own moral authority, you cannot lead.

If, during the very week Islamic supremacists achieve “peak barbarism” with the immolation of a helpless prisoner, you cannot take them on without apologizing for sins committed a thousand years ago, you have prepared the ground for strategic paralysis.

All that’s left is to call it strategic patience.