President Obama's foreign policy prognostications are coming back to haunt him.
It's bad enough that the The New York Times wrote this Tuesday: "Time and again, [Obama] has expressed assessments of the world that in the harsh glare of hindsight look out of kilter with the changed reality he now confronts."
Obama's repeated declarations that "the tide of war is receding" and that he's put "al Qaeda on the run" are shown now for what they were: flat-out wrong. The violent al Qaeda offshoot IS, dismissed once by Obama as a mere "JV team," has taken over large parts of Iraq and Syria and brutally murdered two American journalists as a message to the United States.
Obama only hurt matters when he said August 28 that "we don't have a strategy yet" on how to fight the group.
"We don't have a strategy" was a brilliant way to lower the bar for tonight's speech.
— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) September 10, 2014
As Business Insider wrote, when Obama addresses the nation Wednesday about how the U.S. will battle ISIL, "He will be talking to an American public that is significantly more hawkish than at any time during his tenure in office."
Besides the infamous "Kobe Bryant" comments on ISIL, Obama also remarked that sanctions against Russia are "working as intended," although they have done nothing to deter Vladimir Putin from his pattern of aggression, and he said in 2011 that the U.S. was leaving Iraq behind as "sovereign, stable and self-reliant."
Obama's paid a political price for these failings. His approval rating on foreign policy is at a new low of 32 percent.