I just wanted to take a moment to draw your attention to this particular op-ed, because… dang. Former Bush-administration State Department official Liz Cheney is going straight for the jugular with this one, and it is as damning an account of President Obama’s foreign policy failures as I’ve read.

In March 2009, at an Americas summit meeting in Mexico City, President Obama listened as Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega delivered a venomous diatribe against America. Mr. Obama stood to speak and accepted Mr. Ortega’s version of history. “I’m very grateful,” Mr. Obama said, “that President Ortega didn’t blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.” In April 2009, in France, Mr. Obama proclaimed that America must make deep cuts in its nuclear arsenal because only then would the country have “the moral authority to say to Iran, don’t develop a nuclear weapon, to say to North Korea, don’t proliferate nuclear weapons.” Embracing the leftist fallacy that the key to world peace is for the U.S. to pre-emptively disarm, the president has reportedly begun reviewing options to take our nuclear stockpile to levels not seen since 1950. These are steps you take only if you believe that America—not her enemies—is the threat. … If you really want to know whether our adversaries fear us, ask the Russians, whose thuggish President Putin essentially endorsed Mr. Obama recently. Perhaps Mr. Putin is banking on the missile defense “flexibility” Mr. Obama promised he would have after the election. The president says he “ended the war in Iraq” and is “ending the war in Afghanistan.” If only wishing made it so. A better description of what Mr. Obama is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is rushing for the exits. … He is so busy retreating that we are likely to leave in a our wake a failed state where the Taliban and terrorist organizations like al Qaeda can once again operate.

As Cheney points out, most of President Obama’s dealings on the international stage have been nothing short of a string of groveling apologies and attempts to weaken America and fall back to everybody else’s impuissant level, instead of us telling them what’s up, because apparently we don’t have to “moral authority” to do so. Wow. There are real and growing existential threats in this world, but the president has targeted military cuts before entitlement reform, appeased hostile foreign bodies, and willfully diminished America’s authority — and while we (rightfully) tend to be more preoccupied with more insular concerns, it’s important not to forget that this president’s policies abroad haven’t been any better for America than his domestic ones.

As Larry Sabato tweeted this morning,

Real crisis effect: Helping Obama broaden campaign beyond his main weakness, the economy. — Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) September 13, 2012

Int’l chaos favors incumbent POTUS short-term. Yet events can spin in many different directions. Best bet: Unsettled calm, campaign moves on — Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) September 13, 2012

While chaos reigns in the Middle East at the moment, a lot of this is likely to settle into the background again before long, and we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled presidential campaign program. But if the Obama campaign is so bent on producing distractions, and if this does happen to escalate into something bigger, there is really no good reason why a foreign-policy related issue at the forefront should be of any help whatsoever to President Obama (or at least, in theory, there shouldn’t be any good reason, but when the mainstream media has already made up their minds… ugh). The majority of Obama’s foreign-policy ‘strategy’ has been absolutely awful, and Romney was right to capitalize on the moment to point that out. The economy may be Obama’s greatest weakness, but it couldn’t hurt to remind America that his commander-in-chiefdom has been nothing short of embarrassing and endangering, too. Again, if only the media hadn’t already decided which direction this is going to go. Blergh.