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Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge — while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in free fall. It gets worse. The Gulf States’ top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief....

Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti–Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge — while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in free fall. It gets worse. The Gulf States’ top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief....

<p>Gulf of Aden: Iran sends a flotilla of warships and weapons-carrying freighters to reinforce the rebels in Yemen — a noncontiguous, non-Persian, nonthreatening (to Iran) Arabian state — asserting its new status as regional bully and arbiter. The Obama administration sends an aircraft carrier group, apparently to prevent this gross breach of the UN weapons embargo on Yemen. Instead, the administration announces that it has no intention of doing anything. Meanwhile, it exerts pressure on Saudi Arabia to halt its air war over Yemen and agree to negotiate a political settlement involving Iran.</p>

In December, President Obama said that he wished to see Iran ultimately become a “very successful regional power.” His wish — a nightmare for the Western-oriented Arab states — is becoming a reality. Consider: ● Gulf of Aden: Iran sends a flotilla of warships and weapons-carrying freighters to reinforce the rebels in Yemen — a noncontiguous, non-Persian, nonthreatening (to Iran) Arabian state — asserting its new status as regional bully and arbiter. The Obama administration sends an aircraft carrier group, apparently to prevent this gross breach of the U.N. weapons embargo on Yemen. Instead, the administration announces that it has...

She Rides By Van: The Hillary Clinton Launch By Charles Krauthammer April 16 See Hillary ride in a van! Watch her meet everyday Americans! Witness her ordering a burrito bowl at Chipotle! Which she did wearing shades, as did her chief aide Huma Abedin, yielding security-camera pictures that made them look (to borrow from Karl Rove) like fugitives on the lam, wanted in seven states for a failed foreign policy. There’s something surreal about Hillary Clinton’s Marie Antoinette tour, sampling cake and commoners. But what else can she do? After Barack Obama, she’s the best-known political figure in America. She...

In addition to being a regular on Fox News and a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Charles Krauthammer is also a board certified psychiatrist. So he presumably knows what he’s talking about when he discusses mental disorders and diseases. That’s why it was particularly interesting to hear Krauthammer’s use of the word “pathological” when describing President Obama’s sneering attack on Scott Walker in connection with the governor’s comments about the Iran nuclear agreement. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines “pathological” as “extreme in a way that is not normal or that shows an illness or mental problem.” Video at source:

“He thinks he is going to do a Nixon to China. He is the man who is going to develop the entente, the understanding, the condominium with Iran to run the Middle East. We will join with them. We are going to recognize their presence, their dominance in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, and now in Yemen as that will be the reward for having cut a deal with us on nuclear weapons.” “That’s impossible, O’Reilly said, “because if that ever were to come true, we would alienate all of the Sunni nations. Saudi Arabia, the Emirates…” “But that’s exactly...

Krauthammer’s Take: ‘It’s Clear that Obama Loathes Netanyahu March 18, 2015 President Obama’s approach to Iran and the Middle East was firmly rejected in Israel’s election on Tuesday, in which prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu won reelection, said Charles Krauthammer. “This was an election between Bibi and Obama — that was on the ballot,” he said on Wednesday’s Special Report. “He did everything he could to unseat him, but he failed.”

Krauthammer’s Take: Hillary Is Not Trying to Clear the Air, Because She Can’t March 5, 2015 Why doesn’t Hillary Clinton do a no-holds-barred, Chris Christie-style press conference to clear the air over her secret email accounts? “Because the answers to the questions, if remotely honest,” says Charles Krauthammer, “are self-indicting.” “The reason that she can’t do a Christie, and do a two-hour press conference, where she clears the air,” Krauthammer explained on Thursday’s Special Report, “is — two reasons. Number one, she’s a Clinton, and what the Clintons do is never ‘clear the air’; they spend the first month or...

Krauthammer’s Take: Iranian Negotiations Are ‘Simply Catastrophic’ On Tuesday’s Special Report, Charles Krauthammer said the United States’ ongoing negotiations with Iran are misguided and make President Obama’s other foreign policy blunders look favorable by comparison. “This [deal] will mean a lifting of the sanctions, so Iran will be with a very strong economy, undeterred, nothing in any way holding it back; it’s simply catastrophic,” Krauthammer said. “It is an unbelievably bad deal. It makes the Cuba deal look like a really good bargain.” Krauthammer explained that he thinks the United States is negotiating from a place of weakness, which...

Columnist Charles Krauthammer compared President Obama’s handling of the war on terror to James Buchanan before the Civil War on Monday’s “O’Reilly Factor” on the Fox News Channel.

On Friday’s broadcast of Hugh Hewitt’s radio program, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer reacted to remarks made by President Barack Obama at Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast. Krauthammer criticized Obama primarily for invoking the Inquisition and the Crusades on the heels of the ISIS video showing the burning of a Jordanian pilot. “I actually think he was doing it, he’ll trot it out when he does the Iran deal, but the more immediate thing was simply to dismiss the barbarism that we saw with the immolation of the Jordanian pilot, and to make everybody believe that this is really nothing out...

Charles Krauthammer tonight slammed President Barack Obama’s remarks today at the National Prayer Breakfast, where Obama compared ISIS attacks to the violence committed by Christians in the Crusades. “Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ," Obama said.

While Iran’s march toward a nuclear bomb has provoked a major clash between the White House and Congress, Iran’s march toward conventional domination of the Arab world has been largely overlooked. In Washington, that is. The Arabs have noticed. And the pro-American ones, the Gulf Arabs in particular, are deeply worried. This week, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized control of the Yemeni government, heretofore pro-American. In September, they overran Sanaa, the capital. On Tuesday, they seized the presidential palace. On Thursday, they forced the president to resign. The Houthi have local religious grievances, being Shiites in a majority Sunni land. But...

On Sunday, at the great Paris rally, the whole world was Charlie. By Tuesday, the veneer of solidarity was exposed as tissue thin. It began dissolving as soon as the real, remaining Charlie Hebdo put out its post-massacre issue featuring a Muhammad cover that, as the New York Times put it, “reignited the debate pitting free speech against religious sensitivities.” Again? Already? Had not 4 million marchers and 44 foreign leaders just turned out on the streets of France to declare “No” to intimidation, and pledging solidarity, indeed identification (“Je suis Charlie”) with a satirical weekly specializing in the most...

The lone wolf is the new nightmare, dramatized and amplified this week by the hostage-taking attack in Sydney. But there are two kinds of lone wolves — the crazy and the evil — and the distinction is important. The real terrorists are rational. Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, had been functioning as an Army doctor for years. Psychotics cannot carry that off. Hasan even had a business card listing his occupation as SoA (Soldier of Allah). He then went out and, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” shot dead 13 people, 12 of them fellow soldiers. To this day, Hasan speaks...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of “The O’Reilly Factor,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer weighed in Al Sharpton and his association with President Barack Obama. Fill-in host Eric Bolling noted that Sharpton has made 81 apparent visits to the White House, which conveys a relationship that which Krauthammer indicated was not appropriate.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee defended himself Tuesday against allegations that his point of order vote, which he earned in partnership with Sens. Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions, contributed to President Barack Obama being able to confirm more of his nominees through the outgoing Democratic Senate majority. “Look, I’ve got tremendous respect for Charles Krauthammer, but he does not have a crystal ball,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee said on the Laura Ingraham radio show.

Old habits die hard. The media are so enamored of the continuing (and largely contrived) story about the great Republican civil war that they fail to appreciate that the real internecine fight is being waged on the other side of the aisle. I grant that there’s a lot of shouting today among Republicans. But it’s a ritual skirmish over whether a government shutdown would force the president to withdraw a signature measure — last time, Obamacare; this time, executive amnesty. And it will likely be resolved with the obvious expedient of funding the government through next year, except for a...

It’s not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter...