Washington is paying a high price for its policy of appeasement. The cost to the nation will be extreme.

“The Obama administration’s decision Sunday to shutter nearly two dozen U.S. diplomatic posts has given jihadists something to celebrate …. ‘God is great! America is in a condition of terror and fear from al Qaeda,’ wrote one jihadist in an online forum, according to the Times. ‘The mobilization and security precautions are costing them billions of dollars. We hope to hear more of such psychological warfare, even if there are no actual jihadi operations on the ground’” (Newsmax, August 8).

The cost of the president’s policy of appeasing all who hate America has escalated dramatically since we turned tail and ran from our Middle Eastern, North African and Pakistani embassies just over a week ago based on the mere shadow of an unidentified threat of attack.

In the wake of this latest diplomatic debacle, the current U.S. presidency risks overseeing the greatest elevation of international hatred for America since the United States became a sovereign nation.

The paradox is that this presidency started out declaring it would “fix” what it maintained was the damaging foreign policy of the previous administration.

Well, the plain truth is that America is now in a far worse “fix” than it ever was under the Bush administration!

Take Egypt—and the whole Muslim world for that matter—for example.

In June 2009, President Obama traveled to the Middle East where he delivered his keynote foreign-policy speech at Cairo University in Egypt to define America’s relationship with the Muslim world.

At the time, our editor in chief commented:

I have no reason to doubt Mr. Obama’s sincerity, but his words will cause deadly problems. The president said, “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” In other words, he believes America by itself should not prevent another nation from getting nuclear bombs—a signal to the world that America the superpower is dead! That means America has no right to forcefully stop Iran’s nuclear program, even though Iran is the number one terrorist-sponsoring nation in the world by far!

This was an obvious reference to Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Having noted that Iran, the most significant sponsor of terror in the world, “istheking of terrorand makes the Middle East tremble,” Mr. Flurry then continued: “President Obama thinks that through his words, he will have peace with Iran. But after the terrorists heard that speech, they had to be rejoicing! When America’s president gives a speech like that, the terrorists have contempt for such weakness and are stirred to fight even harder. They can smell the victory. So we can expect violent terrorism to intensify and shake the nations!” (emphasis added throughout).

How prescient were those words. We did not have to wait long to see their effect. In December 2010, the so-called Arab Spring began rippling right across northern Africa and throughout the Middle East, toppling leaders and more deeply entrenching Islamist terrorism. The governments in Tunisia, Libya and Yemen were overthrown, as was that of the very nation where President Obama delivered his keynote Middle Eastern speech—Egypt—twice!

The turmoil unleashed continued to spread across Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Djibouti, Mauritania, Western Sahara and Mali in Northern Africa. In the Middle East, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Oman all felt the wave of protest that morphed from the initial reactions in Tunisia on December 2010. The Arab Spring protests even reached as far east as Khuzestan, a province in southwest Iran.

It is hard not to connect this unprecedented wave of protests and insurgencies with the impact of President Obama’s appeasing keynote speech to the Muslim world delivered in Cairo, June 4, 2009.

In classic liberal/socialist speak, Ross Colvin, reporting for Reuters at the time, wrote that President Obama’s speech was designed to send a message to the Muslim world that the U.S. was ready to mend America’s relationship with it, claiming that this relationship had been “severely damaged” under the presidency of George W. Bush.

It takes very little research to prove that the index of hatred of the United States—by the Muslim world in particular—has escalated markedly since President Obama’s Cairo speech to a point far in excess of that which obtained during President George W. Bush’s term in office.

Foreign Policy magazine, observing the recent wave of hatred for America rippling across the world of Islam, compared the results of polls on Islamist nations’ opinions of the U.S: “In May 2008 … only 6 percent approved of the leadership in Washington, according to polling by Gallup. This changed very briefly after Obama’s election and his June 2009 speech at Cairo University, as approval of the United States in Gallup polling peaked in mid-2009 at 37 percent. But that number crashed below even George W. Bush levels within a year” (July 19).

FP further reported that today, “Even longtime observers of Egyptian rhetoric have been taken aback by the vitriol and sheer lunacy of the current wave of anti-American rhetoric. The streets have been filled with fliers, banners, posters, and graffiti denouncing President Barack Obama for supporting terrorism and featuring Photoshopped images of Obama with a Muslim-y beard or bearing Muslim Brotherhood colors.”

This is the high price of Washington’s appeasing foreign policy toward Islamist extremism and its murderous counterpart, Muslim-funded terrorism.

And it does not stop with Egypt.

“Eliot Cohen, former adviser to George W. Bush’s administration, pungently observed of the White House’s fecklessness, ‘Nobody’s saying there are any real consequences that would come from crossing [Obama]—and that’s an awful position for the president of the United States to be in’” (ibid, August 8).

FP pointed out the remarkable diplomatic deficit that the current U.S. administration has racked up since America’s current president gained office:

Obama’s past hollow threats and “red lines” on Syria have eroded American credibility and now regrettably make a diplomatic solution to that war all but impossible. The administration’s confused and contradictory policies on Iran have likewise emboldened Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to resist a diplomatic settlement. On Egypt, the White House has somehow pulled off the trifecta of diplomatic debacles by alienating the liberals, the Islamists, and the military (in other words, almost everyone). In Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki more and more sides against U.S. interests, even while terrorism and instability begin to afflict his country again. The administration’s poisoned relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai mirrors the overall deterioration in Afghanistan.

Facing the facts, even if the U.S. had strong decisive Roosevelt/Regan-style leadership waiting in the wings for the next election—which it doesn’t—it would be an impossible task for such a leader to revive respect for the power that was once America’s.

America’s current administration will have the dubious reputation of being documented in history as the presidency that ultimately oversaw the prophesied breaking of the pride of American power (Leviticus 26:19).

The problem is, a grave suspicion remains in the minds of close, very objective, observers of this scenario that it is all the consequence of a deliberate radical agenda which set out to achieve that very result.

One of the most blunt and direct assessments of the current administration in Washington came recently from Lawrence Sellin, a retired colonel who served for 29 years in the U.S. Army Reserve. Sellin is a veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq. His terse summation of the current presidency is summed up in the following item published on Family Security Matters on August 5: “The anti-American political philosophies underlying the policies of Barack Hussein Obama can be defined as the juncture of three ideologies: socialism, Islam and opportunistic racism to foster resentment among minority groups and promote race and class conflict as a lubricant for his radical transformation of the United States.”

Voicing the concerns that a substantial number of Americans increasingly feel, yet have no real and effective forum from which to have them addressed—least of all the mass media nor even a seemingly supine Congress—Colonel Sellin states: “Many Obama policies seem inexplicable to patriotic Americans because they often run counter to the interests of the country. They include unsustainable federal spending, lax border security, a weakened military and the undermining of individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution.”

Yet the greatest concern that the colonel airs is in respect of doubts as to the degree of loyalty the present U.S. administration has toward its own home nation. Of this Sellin declares: “There are also persistent questions by a growing number of Americans regarding the extent of Obama’s allegiance to the United States.”

It is this atmosphere surrounding America’s current foreign policy which is being taken substantial advantage of by Islamist extremism, and, most especially, terrorism’s chief sponsor, Iran. To repeat that prescient—in fact prophetic—statement made by our editor in chief following President Obama’s Cairo speech, “[T]he terrorists have contempt for such weakness and are stirred to fight even harder. They can smell the victory.”

Notice that Gerald Flurry then directly connects the effect of that speech to a profound, earthshaking prophecy for our times: “So we can expect violent terrorism to intensify and shake the nations!”

Never in modern times have we seen such a shaking of the nations as that which has occurred from the Arab Spring to this date!

You need to understand this powerful prophecy for our day.

Read our booklets The King of the South and America Under Attack. They will open your eyes to the real effect of Washington’s policy of appeasement, and the most dangerous events that, as a direct consequence, will follow.

These booklets will show you that the terrible effects on the nation—and indeed the whole world—that such an appeasing policy is bound to bring about, are, in reality, a great sign of your Savior’s imminent return. His coming will enable the enactment of the perfect foreign policy, a universal policy based upon God’s immutable law, guaranteed to bring about ultimate world peace—forever!