Is Obama Ignorant? How Not To Be Charged! Iran Speeding But No Ticket Issued! Obama's Rationale For Avoiding Military Force!

I do not own a cell phone.  Does that mean I am not cool?




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Iran and where it is going. Apparently, Obama has no desire to alter their direction or intention to become nuclear.


Though, Iran has been  caught speeding  no ticket is issued! (See 1 below.)
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Pass bad legislation that was never read, everyone did not want,  allow it to remain, enforce it and let its cost add to our burgeoning deficit , ipso facto, it becomes part of our unwanted way of life.  How sad indeed.

Subsequently, challenge it in The Supreme Court and because the Chief Justice, in his search for court amity, ruled in a manner that perhaps insures it will remain the law and you have what is called American Justice! (See 2, 2a  and 2b below.)
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Is our president ignorant, are those who interview him ignorant, do those who drink his 'Kool Aid 'ignorant?  You decide! (See 3 below.)

This is a recap of Obama's strategy and why he refuses to use the military as a component of his foreign policy.

In order  to reinforce his view he denies certain facts which  challenge his approach. (See 3a below.)
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Oregon's Democrat Governor resigns   because of alleged misdeeds involving  his fiancee.  Apparently she failed to pay taxes on special favors gleaned from the governor.

I would think this would entitle them to a private meeting with Al Sharpton in The Oval Office so he can instruct them  on how not to be charged. See : "Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber resigns amid ethics investigations"
By Maria L. Ganga
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Dick
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1)- Iran Speeding to Nuclear Weapons Breakout

By Bassam Tawil

Iran, with its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, has surrounded all the oil fields in the region and is currently busy encircling Jordan, Israel and Palestine.

Iran not only reaches now from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, but Iranian Shi'ites have been spreading out through Africa and South America.

By the time U.S. President Barack Obama leaves office, Iran will not only have nuclear breakout capability, but also the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver its nuclear warheads to Europe and North America.

If Iran can finally drive the U.S. out of the Gulf by threatening U.S. assets, it will be free to pursue still further expansion.

 If the deal signed with Iran is full of loopholes, it is Obama who will be blamed. Does Obama really want his legacy to be, "The President who was even a bigger fool than Neville Chamberlain"? He will not be seen as "Nixon in China." He will be seen as the Eid al-Adha lamb.

Recently, foreign ministers from the European Union (EU) have been holding meetings with representatives of the Arab and Muslim world, including Turkey and Qatar, with the intention of forming a "joint task force to fight Islamist terrorism."

Turkey and Qatar, for example, directly encourage Islamist terrorism, thus there is no way they can be part of a task force to act against it.

In some Islamic thinking, such nonsense, because of its certain lack of ever seeing the light, is merely a prologue to the ultimate war between Gog and Magog ("yagug wamagu"), and heralds the End of Days.

The Arab-Muslim world engages in perpetual internal strife. Iran, for instance, with its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, has surrounded all the oil fields in the region, and is currently busy encircling Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians. Iran not only reaches now from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, but Iranian Shi'ites have been spreading out through Africa and South America. Another sign of the End of Days is the United States' collaboration with Iran against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. It means the world will eventually pay for America's looking the other way while the Iranians are building nuclear bombs in their cellars.-

These cellars may currently be distant from the shores of the United States, but they are close to all the oil fields in the Middle East. By the time U.S. President Barack Obama leaves office, Iran will not only have nuclear breakout capability, but also intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver its nuclear warheads. Its next target will be U.S. assets in the Gulf. If Iran can finally drive the U.S. "Great Satan" out of the Gulf by threatening U.S. assets, it will be free to pursue still further expansion.

These are or will be the victims of America's determination to drag out the problem of an exploding Middle East. That way, U.S. President Barack Obama can hand the region over to the next president, while forever pretending that the vacuum created by pulling U.S. troops out of the Middle East -- now being filled by Iran, the Islamic State and other terror groups -- had nothing to do with him.

This situation leaves, ironically, the lone voice of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crying in the wilderness. As much as many of us may not like him or the people he represents, he is one of the two world leaders in the West telling the truth, warning of what is to come (Geert Wilders of the Netherlands is the other). This burden of responsibility for his people (how many of us wish our leaders had even a bit of that?) has earned him only the venom of the Obama Administration, who see him as trying to spoil their strategy of leading by procrastination.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the Obama Administration's policy consists of running after Iran, in order to concede everything it wants, just to be able wave a piece of paper not worth the ink on it, claiming there is "a deal." Iran, for its part, would probably prefer not to sign anything, and most likely will not. Meanwhile, both sides continue strenuously to claim the opposite.

Western leaders just seem not to be programmed to understand the capabilities of other leaders, and how they, too, negotiate, manipulate and hide behind lies. Obama's Russian "Reset Button" did not work; his "Al Qaeda is on the run," did not work; "We shall never let Russia take the Ukraine" did not work; and the unwinnable Israel-Palestinian "Peace Process" did not work.

Obama, in order to wave a piece of paper not worth the ink on it, seems eager to fall victim to bogus promises, worthless treaties and other leaders' outright lies -- only to look an even bigger fool than Britain's former Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. After meeting with Germany's with Adolf Hitler in 1938, Chamberlain returned to Britain boasting of "peace in our time." But

Chamberlain did not have the luxury of seeing a Chamberlain duped before him. If the deal signed with Iran is full of loopholes, it is Obama who will be blamed. Does Obama really want his legacy to be, "The president who was an even bigger fool than Neville Chamberlain"? He will not be seen as "Nixon in China." He will be seen as the Eid al-Adha lamb.

Bassam Tawil is a scholar based in the Middle East.

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2)  ObamaCare Revisited

By Elise Cooper

Last week the House voted to repeal ObamaCare. Yet, it appears that it is no longer first and foremost a part of the American psyche and consciousness. Although the bill is still extremely unpopular the longer it continues the more it will become engrained as part of the healthcare system. 

Someone who has been on the front lines to repeal this inadequate bill is Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah). He confirms that the longer ObamaCare remains a law the harder it will be to abolish it. He told American Thinker, “That is not to say it is a lost cause since millions of Americans have lost and continue to lose their employer sponsored health insurance. Our endgame should be to repeal it in its entirety and replace it with something that puts doctors and patients in charge of their own healthcare decisions. There is a possibility we could do it through budget reconciliation to avoid the sixty votes threshold.  But whatever we do regarding the bill, we will most likely have to override the president’s veto. By putting a repeal bill on the president’s desk this will force him to tell the American people that even though it has not helped most Americans and most do not like it, nevertheless, he will make us live with it.  He does not understand that this law is not gaining in popularity, and is its own worst enemy.”

The senator further noted that it is the Republican majority’s responsibility to repeal it and further down the line unite behind a Republican replacement plan after “competing in the market place of ideas.” However, he does not want to wait for repeal because so many Americans are being adversely affected.  He gave numerous examples of its ill affects, including a possible increase in taxes, a high deductible, and larger premiums. Senator Lee warns Americans, “Some might have to prove they purchased qualified health insurance while waiting for their tax refunds with the possibility they will have to pay a penalty of up to 1% of their income. For those receiving Obamacare subsidies, they will have to reconcile what they received with the amount they were eligible. If they did the wrong calculations or received a larger salary through maybe a raise, someone could owe the IRS thousands of dollars.”

Justin is very concerned for his wife, who is a medical student graduating in May. “I have warned her that eventually doctors that won’t take Medicaid/Medicare patients will be accused of discriminating against the poor and elderly. I am sure it will come down to forcing doctors to take these patients even if they are losing money.”  He also wanted to point out that many college students had their insurance cancelled, which was the subject of his article in the New York Post.Because the college coverage is subject to the same requirements as the general pool, it became a lot more costly.  His school determined it would be too expensive for the general population in the new ObamaCare world so they cancelled the plan.  He wishes that the clock could be turned back regarding health insurance.

Justin is not the only one who feels let down by the system. Last year in November, American Thinker interviewed some who felt betrayed by the president, his administration, and the Democrats in Congress. American Thinker revisited with those who were interviewed.

In the article last year Allyson confirmed that her insurance policy was cancelled and decided to look into catastrophic insurance. She blamed herself for not being more aware and is thankful that many of those who voted for ObamaCare were not re-elected. She is now enrolled in Meta-Share because this is the only insurance her family could afford. Yet, even these premiums are double what she was paying, and every time her family goes to a doctor they pay a negotiated fee that includes a co-pay. Allyson estimates that she pays approximately $150 more for a pediatric visit, and admits, “we don’t go as often as before because it costs a lot more money.” 

Betsy, who is in her fifties, was very upset that her plan was cancelled because it did not include maternity and pediatrics. Considering she and her husband obviously no longer need that benefit she is extremely frustrated. Last year, she found an affordable plan that was not compliant with ObamaCare. However, this past December that insurance is no longer available.  She did find insurance, but it is double the cost, and has a huge deductible of $12,000. In addition, she and her husband had to take her son off of the insurance since they could not afford the premiums for three people. Betsy is angry because she was one of those who liked her doctor and insurance and was unable to keep it. She recently stated, “I feel forgotten. I cannot believe the president does not believe in compromise and that he has tunnel vision regarding health insurance. He is not listening to the American people, has no intention of re-visiting this plan, and is more in love with being President than doing the actual job. Last year I wrote a whole number of letters, received a canned response on how wonderful ObamaCare is, and that I should be thankful it is available. Basically this administration’s attitude is too bad, so sad.”

In 2013, Dean and his wife could not afford insurance so he decided to self-insure. Since he just turned sixty-five he is eligible for the Medicare Advantage Plan through Blue Cross.  His wife is not of eligible age so they found a policy that costs $1000/month, with a $5000 deductible. Compare that to what they had before ObamaCare, for two people they paid $770/month with a $2500 deductible. He is extremely frustrated because he says Obamacare has a “decapitation program. I can see the doctor at a facility a few blocks from my house, but cannot use their lab. This is all about money and is not about healthcare anymore.”

Cade, a small business owner in his thirties, was thinking of not getting insured. However, he has recently married so he is covered on his wife’s policy. Cade is very concerned for his twelve employees, because he was unable to provide insurance for them. Although he is one of the lucky ones since his wife works for a large corporation he also remembers how he felt last year, “the government is trying to harm me because ObamaCare is awful.”

Sharyl Attkisson also wants to raise awareness regarding the magnitude of the healthcare problem. She has asked Americans to comment on the failure of ObamaCare and how it affected them personally.  The horror stories she has collected can be found here.


All interviewed by American Thinker are hoping that Republicans will actually listen to their stories and allow them to weigh in on what a new insurance plan should include. Doctors should look at their hard expenses, decide on a fair price for services, and allow competition to cut health care costs. Senator Lee insists that Republicans need a plan that is a viable alternative, and must be driven by free market forces across state lines. 

The others interviewed basically were in agreement on wanting ObamaCare repealed and not reformed. They want the government to get out of healthcare all together, want to be in personally in charge of the policy chosen, and want to be able to choose the coverage. However, they want any new bill to include coverage for pre-existing conditions and allowing children to be on their parents plan until age twenty-six.  They also want the Republican Congress to actually listen to what they and their fellow Americans are saying. Hopefully, a Republican plan will emphasize the care while bringing down the cost.

The author writes for American Thinker.  She has done book reviews, author interviews, and has written a number of national security, political, and foreign policy articles.

2a)

Did Chief Justice John Roberts Save the Affordable Care Act?

BY JEFFREY TOOBIN

The Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature achievement, will soon face a challenge, in the Supreme Court case known as King v. Burwell, that could conceivably destroy it. In fact, the Act may survive because of a legal doctrine beloved by conservatives and championed by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Every first-year law student learns about the principle of “standing” in civil-procedure class. Under Article III of the Constitution, the federal courts are only allowed to hear “cases” and “controversies.” For decades, the Supreme Court has interpreted those words to mean that plaintiffs must be able to show an “injury in fact” from a law in order to have the right to bring a case challenging the law.

For many years, liberals who have tried to bring federal cases to challenge government actions—in areas from the environment to welfare rights—have been thwarted by conservatives wielding the standing doctrine as a way to throw these cases out of court. During the George H. W. Bush Administration, a coalition of environmental and conservation groups sued to stop new federal regulations that limited the application of a section of the Endangered Species Act. Chief Justice Roberts, then the Deputy Solicitor General, persuaded the Supreme Court to throw out the case because the plaintiffs would not suffer direct harm from the new regulations and lacked standing to bring the case. InLujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, the court held that a “generally available grievance about government—claiming only harm to his and every citizen’s interest in proper application of the Constitution and laws, and seeking relief that no more directly and tangibly benefits him than it does the public at large—does not state an Article III case or controversy.”

All of which leads to the case now before the Supreme Court, King v. Burwell,which is to be argued on March 4th. The case, which was expressly devised to take down the Affordable Care Act, centers on a provision that gives individuals who fall within a certain income threshold—roughly above poverty but below wealth—tax subsidies to pay for health insurance. The case is based on the claim that the Obama Administration policy of allowing those who received tax subsidies to buy insurance on the federal exchanges—which cover the thirty-four states that don’t have state-run exchanges—violates the terms of the Affordable Care Act itself. If the plaintiffs succeed in making their case, eight million people are estimated to lose their health insurance, and the A.C.A. itself could subsequently unravel.

But the King case, like any case, can only proceed if the plaintiffs have standing—that is, if they can claim an “injury in fact” from the Obamacare law. Thanks to two recent, excellent pieces of journalism, in Mother Jones and the Wall Street Journal, we now know a great deal about the four plaintiffs. Two are veterans of the Armed Forces and can receive health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs; accordingly, they have no reason to seek the tax subsidies under the law. The other two plaintiffs may make too little money to qualify for the tax subsidies, and, furthermore, one who claimed to be a Virginia resident listed a motel that prohibits long-term stays as her address. In short, the provisions of the Affordable Care Act in question in King v. Burwell may be irrelevant to all four plaintiffs—which would mean that they lack standing to challenge it.

The Obama Administration did not raise the standing issue in its brief to the Supreme Court in King v. Burwell. However, the standing issue is “jurisdictional,” which means that plaintiffs must always prove standing, whether the defendants raise the issue or not. The Justices can always take it upon themselves to investigate the record in the case to determine whether the plaintiffs have standing, and even as late as days before the argument, Administration lawyers can write a letter to the court calling attention to the issue of the plaintiffs’ questionable standing. If the Justices ask questions about standing at the oral argument next month, it’s a good clue that a dismissal of the case on standing grounds is at least a possibility.

Of course, a dismissal of the case because the plaintiffs lack standing would not settle the legal issue of whether the tax subsidies are legal in the thirty-four states. Presumably, another lawsuit could proceed with more appropriate plaintiffs. But, in and out of government, lawyers are taught to believe that a win is a win. If lawyers for the Obama Administration can keep the A.C.A. alive, even temporarily, through the procedural device of standing, then they will be more than pleased to do so.

2b)

Yep, Obamacare Costs a Fortune

By Christopher Flavelle

Whenever I write about Obamacare's expansion of health insurance, most of the e-mails I get from readers include some version of: Sure, the premiums may be low, but who can afford to see a doctor?

A survey released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation, tracking2015 deductibles and copayments across most exchange plans, says those complaints are at least half right. For all but the most generous Obamacare plans, out-of-pocket payments are usually higher than foremployer-based insurance -- in some cases, drastically so.

Some background: The metal levels in the charts below refer to how consumers are charged. For a bronze plan, the insurer is meant to cover 60 percent of the cost of essential health care, on average, leaving beneficiaries to cover the rest. For silver plans, it's 70 percent; for gold, 80 percent; and for platinum plans, 90 percent. As a result, premiums are generally lowest for bronze plans and highest for platinum.

So it's not surprising that out-of-pocket payments, also called cost-sharing charges, are higher for lower-cost plans. It is surprising just how high those payments are, even for middle-tier exchange plans, and also how high they are compared with the average plans that workers get through their  companies.

Start with annual deductibles. For bronze plans in 2015, they're enormous -- $5,372, or about five times what the average person with employer-based individual coverage faced last year. More important, and potentially worrisome for the law's defenders: Average deductibles for silver plans (the most popular type of exchange coverage) are about three times as high as on employer plans. Even gold plans have slightly higher average deductibles.

Another way to compare cost sharing is to look at the out-of-pocket maximum: the most you'll need to pay during the year (after your premium) for core, in-network health services. Here, not only are 2015 bronze and silver plans about twice as high as for employer-based coverage last year; the out-of-pocket maximums for gold plans are also 50 percent more, on average.

Where most people feel the bite of cost sharing is when they head to the family doctor. On average, it will cost $13 more for that visit on a bronze plan in 2015 than somebody with employer-based insurance had to pay last year. 

Those differences jump if you need to see a specialist. Copayments on a bronze plan are almost twice as high as for employer-provided plans last year, and more than 50 percent higher for silver plans.  

But the most important reason to have health insurance is to protect you from the really expensive stuff -- mainly, the risk that you'll need to be hospitalized. Here, even the highest-value exchange plans impose higher copayments than the average employer-based insurance last year. For silver plans, that cost is about twice as high. 

As usual with health care, the information above comes with caveats. Obamacare protects the poorest beneficiaries from these costs bysubsidizing, on a sliding scale, out-of-pocket payments for people whose income is between 100 percent and 250 percent of the federal poverty line and who enroll in a silver plan. 

For everyone else, you could argue that the exchanges are called "marketplaces" for a reason -- people who choose to buy anything less than platinum-level plans can see beforehand the copayments and deductibles they'll face, and make their decision accordingly.

But that assumes that insurance shoppers will take the time to read the details and understand them. It also assumes that people can do a good job of predicting the health-care services they'll need.

Even if those things hold true, cost sharing on the exchanges is still typically far higher than for the employer-based coverage that about half of Americans still have. Maybe that's a necessary price to pay for extending government-subsidized health care. But it also means that when people complain about the high cost of care, they're not wrong. 

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3)  We Have to Talk About Obama’s Ignorance

By Seth Mandel

In the wake of the controversy over President Obama’s offensive labeling of anti-Semitic violence as “random,” it became clear that regardless of whether he chose his words carefully, he certainly chose his audience carefully. He was not challenged by his interviewer at Vox for his undeniably false characterization of the Paris attacks. And now, having given an interview to BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith, he has continued exposing his own ignorance in the hope that he would continue not to be called on it by his interviewers. He was in luck yet again.

BuzzFeed has posted the transcript of the interview, and when the subject turns to Russia, Obama said this:

You know, I don’t want to psychoanalyze Mr. Putin. I will say that he has a foot very much in the Soviet past. That’s how he came of age. He ran the KGB. Those were his formative experiences. So I think he looks at problems through this Cold War lens, and, as a consequence, I think he’s missed some opportunities for Russia to diversify its economy, to strengthen its relationship with its neighbors, to represent something different than the old Soviet-style aggression. You know, I continue to hold out the prospect of Russia taking a diplomatic offering from what they’ve done in Ukraine. I think, to their credit, they’ve been able to compartmentalize and continue to work with us on issues like Iran’s nuclear program.

As people pointed out immediately, Obama is wrong about Putin and the KGB. Ben Judah, a journalist who recently wrote a book on Putin’s Russia, responded: “The interesting and informative thing about Obama’s view on Putin is how uninsightful and uniformed it is.”

Putin ran the FSB–the successor agency to the KGB–and the difference matters. But what also matters is the emerging pattern for Obama’s view of the world: he has no idea what he’s talking about. The president, as Sam Cooke sang, don’t know much about history. And it’s evident in each major area of conflict the president seeks to solve and ends up only exacerbating.

It is not my intention to run down a list of all Obama’s flubs. Everybody makes mistakes, and any politician whose words are as scrutinized as the president’s is going to have their share of slip-ups. Yes, Obama is a clumsy public speaker; but that’s not the problem, nor is it worth spending much time on.

The problem is that Obama tends to make mistakes that stem from a worldview often at odds with reality. Russia is a good example. Does it matter that Obama doesn’t know the basics of Vladimir Putin’s biography and the transition of post-Soviet state security? Yes, it does, because Obama’s habit of misreading Putin has been at the center of his administration’s failed Russia policy. And it matters with regard not only to Russia but to his broader foreign policy because Obama has a habit of not listening to anyone not named Jarrett. Obama appointed among the most qualified American ambassadors ever to represent the U.S. abroad in sending Michael McFaul to Moscow. But with or without McFaul, Obama let his own naïveté guide him.

Obama has also run into some trouble with history in the Middle East, where history is both exceedingly important and practically weaponized. The legitimacy of the Jewish state is of particular relevance to the conflict. So Obama was criticized widely for undermining that legitimacy in his famous 2009 Cairo speech, puzzling even Israel’s strident leftists. The speech was harder to defend than either his remarks to BuzzFeed or Vox because such speeches are not off the cuff; they are carefully scrutinized by the administration. When Obama could say exactly what he meant to say, in other words, this is what he chose to say.

It wasn’t the only time Obama revealed his ignorance of the Middle East and especially Israeli history, of course. And that ignorance has had consequences. Obama has learned nothing from the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a fact which was reflected quite clearly in his disastrous mishandling of the negotiations and their bloody aftermath. He didn’t understand Palestinian intentions, Israeli political reality, or the lessons from when the U.S. has played a beneficial role in the conflict in the past. The president can simply move on, but Israelis and Palestinians have to pay the price for his learning curve.

And the Vox errors echo throughout the president’s mishandling of the other great security challenge: Islamic terrorism. Such terrorism has contributed a great deal to the undoing of many of the gains in Iraq and the international state system. Here, for example, is a map tweeted out last week by Ian Bremmer, which shows, in his words, “Statelessness overlapping with radical Islam.” We can certainly argue over the chicken-or-egg quality to such an overlap, but the threat radical Islamic violence poses to global order is fairly obvious.

Yet it’s not just the history of Islam and of anti-Semitism that the president gets wrong when trying to spin away the threat of Islamist terror. He also created a firestorm with his faux history of the Crusades in order to draw a false moral equivalence that only obscures the threat.

In other words, it’s a comprehensive historical ignorance. And on matters of great significance–the major world religions, the Middle East, Russia. And the president’s unwillingness to grasp the past certainly gives reason for concern with Iran as well–a country whose government has used the façade of negotiations to its own anti-American ends for long enough to see the pattern.

They’re not just minor gaffes or verbal blunders. They serve as a window into the mind of a president who acts as if a history of the world before yesterday could fit on a postcard. We talk a lot about the defects of the president’s ideology, but not about his ignorance. The two are related, but the latter is lately the one causing a disproportionate amount of damage.


3a)

Obama puts down in writing his troubling worldview

By James Jeffrey February 12

The writer, who served as ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012, is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The Obama administration sent to Congress last week its second report on national security strategy. These updates are mainly a dry inventory of our aspirations, what’s happening in the world and what the United States can do in response, rather than a true strategy. That was the case for this one as well, but bits of it reveal much about how President Obama views the world. Combined with his recent interview by Fareed Zakaria on CNN, his State of the Union address last month and his speech last May at West Point, we can glean a good summary of the president’s basic principles for security policy. Unfortunately, that summary is troubling.

Although Obama’s goals are consistent with mainstream U.S. foreign policy since the onset of the Cold War, his dismissive approach to military force represents a clear departure from that consensus. But that’s nothing new. What’s new is that Obama is strongly reaffirming this approach despite 12 months dominated by military threats to global security order — from Russia, the Islamic State, Iran and China. Yet the two-page summary of major global developments in the introduction of the national security strategy (NSS) included only a brief mention of Russia’s threat and nothing on the others. Rather than highlight these new threats, the president consistently repeated four interrelated security themes:

First, those who use military force are destined for the ash heap of history because force is inherently counterproductive. In the Zakaria interview, Obama kept returning to this theme, on the Islamic State (“Ultimately these terrorist organizations will be defeated because they don’t have a vision that appeals to ordinary people”) and Russia (“The days in which conquest of land somehow was a formula for great-nation status is over.”).

Second, if the United States acts militarily, it inevitably runs a serious risk of overcommitment and disaster. The NSS: “Many of the security problems we face do not lend themselves to quick and easy fixes.” The Zakaria interview: “We don’t approach this with a strategy of sending out occupying armies and playing whack-a-mole wherever a terrorist group appears.” The State of the Union: “When the first response to a challenge is to send in our military, then we risk getting drawn into unnecessary conflicts.” And the West Point speech: “Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences.”

Third, there is “no military solution” to anything. No statement is reiterated by this administration more frequently whenever a crisis emerges, presented as an immutable law that applies not just to us but also to the tyrants and terrorists. Although it does not appear in the NSS, its spirit is there: In a 12-line section on the Islamic State, the military is cited only in passing. While the administration laudably has deployed ground troops to NATO’s eastern borders in response to the Ukraine crisis, this action is not explicitly mentioned.

Fourth, when required, and absent the most compelling security need, military action should be employed through coalitions and after applying diplomatic, economic and other tools, with legality and legitimacy as the guiding principles. According to the NSS, this means “appreciation for the risk to our mission, our global responsibilities, and the opportunity costs at home and abroad.” These are not unreasonable considerations, as long as the traditional principles of military force — decisive action, clear objectives, unity of command and, above all, a commitment to victory — have priority. But the idea of having the military actually accomplish anything, beyond adhering to “process,” is absent.

These themes are internally consistent. If military action is self-defeating even for our foes, there is no need for a countervailing — and possibly disastrous — military response to aggression, since history will eventually cast aside those aggressors who cannot deliver basic governance. Thus, “no military solution.”

But are they correct? This is the important question — because we are betting international peace and our security on them.

The first theme violates a precept that all diplomats must learn: Don’t project your worldview onto others. Assumptions that military force is self-defeating have tragically been proved wrong time and again the world over.

Equally open to question are the linked themes of “no military solution” and “escalation into a morass.” The United States has used or threatened military force frequently since the 1940s. Only three times did we fail with significant costs: in North Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. Those conflicts demonstrated the folly of regime change and social engineering under fire but not the folly of military action per se. Most U.S. military operations during that time were successful, and completed at low cost, from Berlin to the Cuban embargo, the first Gulf War, Kosovo and Bosnia. Obama’s incessant warnings notwithstanding, the United States has generally been able to achieve its military aims without getting bogged down in costly conflicts.

Finally, “no military solution” is simply empty rhetoric. It’s true that any military action ultimately must adhere to political logic. But military action can reinforce political objectives in multiple ways. Its mere threat has political effects on friends and foes, and the impact of combat operations — inflicting pain, seizing territory, threatening to disarm an opponent — also generates political outcomes. This has been made clear recently with Iran on nuclear proliferation and with the Islamic State in Iraq, but the president glosses over the effective use of U.S. military strength even under his own leadership. In this world, the military does solve problems.

The big news of the moment is not the national security strategy’s laundry list of U.S. security goals but the way the use or threat of force by some pretty potent actors is undercutting a 70-year-old global security system. The president might respond, as he said at West Point, that not every problem is a nail susceptible to solution with a military hammer, and that a strong economy and diplomacy are also important to security.

He’s right, but some problems are indeed nails. Almost certainly the next administration, whoever leads it, won’t miss this point. But it is a long time until 2017.

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