Has Reality Dispelled Obama’s Delusions?

[Geee]

National Review:

‘If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart,” President Obama told Democratic mega-contributors last month in one of the 400-plus fundraisers of his presidency.

 

But not to worry. “The world has always been messy,” he said. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.” Like being beheaded by Islamist terrorists. Or having your country invaded by Russian soldiers.

 

The president gives the impression of trying to reassure not so much his audience, as himself. For this is not what he expected for his presidency. The world was not supposed to fall apart. It was supposed to come together, as he assured thousands at Berlin’s Tiergarten in 2008 that their wall had come down because “there is no challenge that is too great for a world that stands as one.”

So one hopes that, as Obama left the fundraiser trail and headed to NATO ally Estonia and the NATO summit in Wales, he arrived stripped of the delusions he carried into his presidency. They include, in no particular order, the following:

 

The delusion that the world would love the United States once the first black president — a “citizen of the world,” as he called himself in Berlin — took office. But symbolism important to American voters has less purchase overseas. The elites and chattering classes of other nations, even allies, are always going to resent the enormous asymmetrical power of the United States and complain about its policies.