Historically, the President of the United States wears the title of “leader of the free world.” Barack Obama, in his presidency has relinquished that role almost gleefully.  As a result, the world is a far more dangerous place.

Charles Crawford, former British ambassador to Sarajavo, Belgrade and Warsaw, said in an article in PunditWire on 16 June, 2013, that Obama’s Cairo speech “set the stage for Egypt’s disaster,” meaning the overthrow of President Mubarak and the election of the Muslim Brotherhood.

President Obama is the personification of leftist progressive ideology totally out of step with harsh reality. It is a faulty policy of denial, of cover up. Making nice doesn’t make it nice.

President George Bush said in the aftermath of 9/11 that, “if America shows weakness and uncertainty there will be as drift towards tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.”  It did happen on Obama’s watch.

What is happening with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, with the spread of Hezb’allah, with the confidence of Hamas and the rejectionism of Israel by the Palestinian Authority, are all consequences of Obama’s feckless foreign policy.

Obama called ISIS “a JV team” earlier this year. As we see the spread of ISIS into Africa and Europe, Iran celebrating the death of sanctions and boasting about their intercontinental ballistic developments, and Russia encroaching into the Ukraine and picking up the Syrian thread dropped by Obama, it appears to an outside observer that it is the Obama Administration that is the JV team.

Let me make it clear to Americans. What you see in Syria, Iraq, with Russia and Iran are not away games. This violence gets exported to Western soft targets as it was in Paris. And, to its enemies, America is the grand prize, and the enemy is playing the long game.

In his own JV moment, Secretary of State, John Kerry, said of the alleged death of ISIS English speaking beheader, known as Jihadi John, “with the death of Jihadi John we are winning and ISIS is losing.”

The slaughter of over a hundred people in Paris just two days later emphasized the pathetic dream world of the US Administration.

The denial that America and the West are at war with Islamic jihad is the prime cause of the weakness in confronting a brutal and determined enemy with a global goal of Shariah law and an Islamic caliphate. This war in nothing new, as a forgotten chapter in American history has been revisited in Brian Kilmeade’s new book Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates. He reminds all who will listen that America waged a war against jihad two hundred years ago and that war, despite the White House whitewash, is being waged against America even stronger today.

When Putin announced he was sending troops and equipment to back up Syria’s Assad, he did it the day after he met with Obama – without telling him in advance that this was his operational plan. At a town hall meeting at Fort Meade, Maryland, on September 11, 2015, Obama talked of a conversation he had with Putin “ four or five years before” in which he advised the Russian leader that is was wrong to provide financial support and arms to Assad. He complained that Putin didn’t listen to him. “He did not take my warnings,” is how Obama expressed it. But when Obama had a golden opportunity to apply the “red lines” that he had said he imposed on President Assad on Syria’s use of chemical weapons, he backed down when challenged by the Syrian dictator’s use of these weapons. This was viewed by every player in the Middle East, including Iran and the regional terror organizations, as further deterioration in American strength and a lack of political will to stand by its word.

The Obama/Kerry nuclear deal with Tehran is looked upon as paving the way to the bomb while gifting a radical and dangerous Iranian regime with $150 Billion for terrorism and military build-up. This is exasperating to America’s allies and a confidence boost to the malevolent actors in the region.

To be sure, the US has played a very short losing game in its fight against ISIS. After stubbornly refusing to “put boots on the ground” in Syria, Obama recently agreed to allow fifty soldiers to play an advisory role there in a weak effort to put facts on the ground. To military and security experts this number is a joke. It’s hardly a number that would make ISIS quiver in fear.

When Israel was forced to respond to thousands of missiles and rockets fired by Hamas last year, they flew 5500 air sorties over Gaza during the fifty-five days of the conflict.  US planes have barely flown 1500 sorties in over a year against ISIS. This, to any military chief, is not serious.

With Russia and Iran displaying muscle, with nefarious Islamic terror armies marching over the Middle East, Africa, Yemen, and attacking and killing European and American targets, the United States and the world are in worse shape today than it was after 9/11.

America has had the blessing of time that is has not suffered the same slaughter we have seen in Paris. It is time to kick political correctness out and call it for what it is.

It is certain that what we saw in the French capital is coming to America. It is predictable. You do not deflect the aims of the enemy by being nice. You do not stop them by surrendering to their demands. America withdrew from Iraq, yet ISIS rolled in to grab major tracts of territory, stole assets, killed, raped, and turned hundreds into slaves. America visibly refused to meddle in Syria, yet ISIS laid down its headquarters there to metastasize into a global Islamic network of evil and death.

France’s President Hollande said, “We will lead a war without pity.” This is the new PC for democracy. It’s a pity he said it the day after Paris and not the months before.

It is a pity that the American president hasn’t said it at all.

Barry Shaw is a Senior Associate at the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies.