One sign of the disrepair of Obama’s foreign policy is the admissions and/or criticism being leveled at it not from Republicans but from those who have served in the highest ranks of the Obama administration.

Take President Obama’s current secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, who admitted yesterday that “the world is exploding all over.” Those comments shouldn’t be confused with the ones made by Mr. Obama’s former defense secretary, Robert Gates, who earlier this year said this: “With all the talk of coming home, of nation building at home, the perception has grown increasingly around the world that the U.S. is pulling back from the global responsibilities that it has shouldered for many decades. I believe Russia and China, among others, see that void and are moving to see what advantage they can take of it.” Secretary Gates’s comments, in turn, shouldn’t be confused with those made by the president’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who a few days ago, in criticizing the president’s self-described “We don’t do stupid sh*t” doctrine, said this: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

The problem for Mr. Obama is that these statements are virtually self-evident. The president can be angry that three of his current and former Cabinet secretaries publicly said what they did. But it’s impossible to deny the merits of their critiques. Only someone living in a world of make-believe would say, for example, that “the tide of war is receding” or that “there have been a number of situations in which you’ve seen this administration intervene in a meaningful way that has . . . substantially improved the — you know, the tranquility of the — of the global community.”  It’s little wonder, then, that the president’s approval rating on foreign policy is now approaching sub-freezing temperatures (33 percent in the most recent McClatchy-Marist poll).

The foreign-policy failures of Mr. Obama are obvious and everywhere. We’re rapidly approaching the point where only the most slavish and obsequious Obama supporters–the Valerie Jarretts, the David Axelrods, and the David Plouffes of the world–can deny what is unfolding before our eyes. In doing so, they prove not their loyalty to Mr. Obama, but their blindness to reality. They aren’t serving the president; they’re disfiguring the truth.

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