Abu Wabu

Charles Krauhammer delivered the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture to the Heritage Foundation on January 19, 2010. Entitled The Age of Obama: Anno Domini 2, the Hammer's lecture brilliantly frames the delusions and ideology that define the virtual world from which Obama vainly struggles to affect the real one.

Abstract: In the real world, as opposed to what French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls President Barack Obama's "virtual world," America faces the reality of Iran's intransigence and aggressiveness; China's headlong pursuit of its own national, regional, and global interests; Russia's determination to regain its Near Abroad; the Arab states' refusal to accept any kind of a reasonable settlement of the kind that Israel has already offered under several governments; Syria's designs on Lebanon; and Hugo Chávez's designs on the weaker countries in Latin America. President Obama's foreign policy agenda of gradual American retreat will have inexorable consequences: When erstwhile allies see the American umbrella being withdrawn, they will have to accommodate themselves to those from whom we were protecting them. If Obama proves impervious to empirical evidence and experience, all these accommodations, the weakening of alliances, the strengthening of centers of adversarial power in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, and elsewhere will continue until we are awakened by some cataclysm.

Read Charles Krauthammer's The Age of Obama: Anno Domini 2

Watch the video, which includes an entertaining Q&A session: