In the first Bush-Kerry debate of the 2004 election, John Kerry was asked about his thoughts on preemptive U.S. military action. From Kerry’s response:

No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

As bad an answer as one could imagine. For starters, there’s no unified “world” to approach for consent, and global disagreement is bound to be most striking on the eve of war. More importantly, a President need not prove the legitimacy of a national security undertaking to anyone other than the people of his nation. As George Bush commented on Kerry’s statement:

Let me — I’m not exactly sure what you mean, “passes the global test,” you take preemptive action if you pass a global test.

My attitude is you take preemptive action in order to protect the American people, that you act in order to make this country secure.

But for Kerry and Democrats like him, that’s not a good enough reason. According to their foreign policy view, American military decisions must be informed by an additional factor: popularity. If we’re merely saving American lives, we’re falling short. We have to make sure that every time an American soldier picks up a gun, it will lead to the rest of the world liking us more.

Barack Obama’s conception of the “global test” takes this silliness to new and frightening heights. On Saturday, at a rally in Oregon, Obama said:

We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.

In other words, now our domestic policies have to pass a global test, too. And not just our domestic policies, but our individual domestic lives. Barack Obama has rendered the American hearth and home subject to world opinion. We can’t “eat as much as we want” and hope to be popular. We can’t sit comfortably in our warm domiciles and hope to build alliances with other countries. Only as a nation of shivering hungry supplicants will America, it seems, reclaim its dominance on the world stage.