The Man Made Of Wax Flew Too High

[From article]
In short, our Icarus-in-Chief, without much foreign-policy experience but with youthful zeal and good intentions, soared far too high for his flimsy waxen wings. Now they are melting, and as the American commander-in-chief careens back to earth, lots of those below are wondering what will come next. Still, there is a lot of irony as Obama freefalls to earth.
[. . .]
Then came the waxen Obama soaring on hope and change, the president who would remake the world along the lines envisioned in a college faculty lounge or a Chicago organizing session. Obama was not a Buchananite isolationist who would be easy for Europeans to caricature. Rather, he is a postmodern, postracial progressive, who deeply felt either that traditional U.S. alliances were not worth the commitment, or that the U.S. was properly moving away from its European heritage and thus without any need for special trans-Atlantic relationships, or that an internationally engaged America came at the expense of dollars better spent on redistributive entitlements at home — or all three and more still.
The result is that the Europeans are increasingly bewildered if not a little anxious. They cannot reduce Obama, a man of the Left, to a caricatured Texan who often misunderstands the world, because Obama is an Ivy Leaguer who has never yet understood it.
[. . .]
Obama is not so much patient as uninterested. [. . .], Europe cannot play Athens when there is no longer a Rome to back it up. The result is a sort of sad update of Stalin’s thuggish but instructive rhetorical question to French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval when the latter in 1935 suggested that the Soviets reach out to the Catholic hierarchy in order to thwart Hitler: “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?”
[. . .]
when Japan and the U.S. uncouple, then China will do what it pleases to Japan — for no other reason than, to paraphrase Dirty Harry, it likes to.
[. . .]
Libya, Syria, Egypt, and the general regional turmoil suggest instead that tribalism, religious intolerance, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and authoritarianism were mostly indigenous and did not need British colonists, Russian generals, American oil men, or the Bush family to activate them. To paraphrase Ward Churchill, with the American recessional from the region, the long-awaited Middle East chickens are coming home to roost.
The nosedive of the melting Obama will leave the world a more dangerous place, but also serve as another mythological reminder of why the pretentious without real wings should not try to fly.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370259/our-icarus-chief-victor-davis-hanson

FEBRUARY 4, 2014 4:00 AM
Our Icarus-in-Chief 
Obama’s global fantasies are falling to earth along with him.
By Victor Davis Hanson