This Is What The World Looks Like When The U.S. Retreats

A member of the CIA helps evacuees up a ladder onto an Air America helicopter on the roof of 22 Gia Long Street April 29, 1975, shortly before Saigon fell to advancing North Vietnamese troops. Wikipedia

Wall Street Journal: What U.S. Retreat Looks Like

Syria reveals the chaos of a world without American leadership.

A friend of ours quipped amid the Iraq debate of 2003 that the only thing Europeans dislike more than U.S. leadership is a world without it. Well, we are now living in such a world, and the result is the disorder and rising tide of war in the Middle East that even the Obama Administration can no longer dismiss. How do you like it?

The epicenter of the chaos is the Syrian civil war now into its fifth year. President Obama justified his decision to steer clear of the conflict by pointing to a parade of horribles if the U.S. assisted the opposition to Bashar Assad. Every one of those horribles—and more—has come to pass in the wake of his retreat.

Syria has become a “geopolitical Chernobyl,” as former General David Petraeus recently put it. It was the breeding ground for Islamic State and is a new sanctuary for terrorism. It has nurtured a growing regional conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, while unleashing the worst refugee crisis on Europe since World War II. And now it has become an arena for potential major power conflict as Vladimir Putin forms an alliance with Iran to make Russia the new Middle East power broker.

WNU Editor: Everything that I have been saying for the past year has been neatly summarized by this Wall Street Journal commentary (and no .... I did not write it). The only thing that is left out of this WSJ post .... President Obama has not paid a political price for it .... and the reason why is simple .... the U.S. no longer has the political or public will to intervene abroad .... in fact ... President Obama's approval rating is still above 50%.