It has taken four years of Obama’s first term, but Europe in particular and every other nation in general understands it is being told “You’re on your own.” The once great superpower that other nations looked to for defense and support is increasingly an island surrounded by two great oceans.
In a recent article in The Telegraph, a London newspaper, Janet Daley summed it up in the wake of the events in Algeria and Mali, two African nations under attack by al Qaeda. “The money which once went into missile silos in Europe—or troops patrolling the Afghan border, or defending existing regimes in countries under threat from jihadi militants—will be spent on Obamacare and the entitlements programs which are close to bankruptcy.”
Pointedly, Daley noted that “During the presidential election campaign, the mainstream media expressed almost no interest at all in the fact that an American ambassador had been killed at his post (for the first time since 1979) by a terrorist mob in Libya.”
By contrast, the Algerian government responded to the attack on a gas processing plant in Amenas with extreme force, killing most of the al Qaeda terrorists involved. In the process, most of the remaining hostages were killed by the jihadists, but kidnapping and ransoming hostages has been a lucrative industry for years now and goes back decades since the emergence of al Qaeda.