Four Existential Threats to America

Member Group : Lincoln Institute

How much damage can President Obama do to the Republic we call the United States of America in his remaining three years and five months in office? Just as he claimed in a conversation with then-Russian President Medvedev, "This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility," are there threats that his new "flexibility" poses to the very continued existence of the American Republic? I argue that there are four major ones, threats that are both existential and not being perceived as linked in the mind of the average American voter.

They are, first, an intentional and unrelenting commitment to weakening America; second, adopting energy policies that hurt us economically, especially the poor; third, undermining the economic well-being of the middle class and small business while cynically claiming to be their champion; and fourth, a systematic assault on the Constitution, especially its principle of the separation of powers. Any one of these policies pursued seriously and continuously could radically change this nation in ways that cannot be easily or quickly corrected. All four of them together are potentially cataclysmic.
Awakening those in the political middle to the reality of these four existential threats will be the principal focus of my organization, Let Freedom Ring, for the next fifteen months. By the political middle, I mean those who are not strong partisans of the Republican or Democratic parties, nor are they committed ideologues of conservatism, libertarianism, liberalism or progressivism. In other words, likely voters who cannot be described by an "ism."

I’ll briefly touch on each of the four threats here on American Radio Journal between now and the end of the Obama Administration. Today, I want you to think about how willful blindness to the most serious and unambiguously hostile threat to America places us in peril of future attacks.

President Obama has chronically mischaracterized and mishandled the threat from what some call Islamic Extremism, but which I prefer to call Jihadism. The left often accuses us of Islamophobia – properly understood, that’s the fear of, not the loathing of, radical Islam. I would argue that the fear is well-placed, and that president Obama is dangerously naïve about it. In a nice turn of phrase in the American Spectator, columnist George Neumayr applies the term Islamophilia to Obama – a childlike attraction to Islam that fails to distinguish between its peaceful and warlike forms. He writes, "At the root of America’s disastrous policy on Egypt lies Obama’s Islamophilia, a stance which leads him to mistake friends for enemies and enemies for friends. Even at this late date, he can’t make the most basic distinctions between pro-American Egyptian military leaders and anti-American Islamic terrorists. His foreign policy rests not on America’s interests but on politically correct prattle about a non-existent "Islamic Spring." If there’s merit in Sun Tzu’s counsel in The Art of War to "know your enemy," then Obama is guilty of failing to know an enemy that frequently leads hundreds of thousands in public chants of "Death to America." Neumayr goes on, "The truth is that Egypt’s military deserves a bonus for beating back the Muslim Brotherhood. If U.S. aid has in fact gone into that effort, it is money well spent. It is certainly more constructive than any of the asinine international projects McCain normally endorses.

"America cannot determine the future of Egypt. That’s a task for the Egyptian people," Obama said last week. "We don’t take sides with any particular party or political figure. I know it’s tempting inside of Egypt to blame the United States or the West or some other outside actor for what’s gone wrong."

It is a little late for Obama to strike this innocent pose. His 2009 Cairo speech was a blown kiss to the Muslim Brotherhood, with its pro-revolution blather about how "Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations" by his odious predecessors. The speech, to which Obama had made a great show of inviting members of the Muslim Brotherhood, laid the groundwork for the overthrow of Mubarak, an American ally, and the rise of Morsi, an Islamic supremacist." That’s just an excerpt from an excellent and provocative article that I hope you’ll look up and read in full on AmericanSpectator.com.

Understanding the four existential threats to our national future posed by Barack Obama and his policies is the most critical civil duty that faces patriotic Americans today. I encourage listeners to American Radio Journal to join Let Freedom Ring in this endeavor.

(Colin Hanna is President of Let Freedom Ring, USA and a regular commentator on American Radio Journal. His web site is www.letfreedomring.org.)