Bret Stephens posted an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about President Obama’s recent speech to the United Nations. Any resemblance between the speech and reality was purely coincidental.

The article reports:

Barack Obama told the U.N.’s General Assembly on Monday he’s concerned that “dangerous currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.” It’s nice of the president to notice, just don’t expect him to do much about it.

Recall that it wasn’t long ago that Mr. Obama took a sunnier view of world affairs. The tide of war was receding. Al Qaeda was on a path todefeat. ISIS was “a jayvee team” in “Lakers uniforms.” Iraq was an Obama administration success story. Bashar Assad’s days werenumbered. The Arab Spring was a rejoinder to, rather than an opportunity for, Islamist violence. The intervention in Libya wasvindication for the “lead from behind” approach to intervention. The reset with Russia was a success, a position he maintained as late as September 2013. In Latin America, the “trend lines are good.”

“Overall,” as he told Tom Friedman in August 2014—shortly after ISIS had seized control of Mosul and as Vladimir Putin was muscling his way into eastern Ukraine—“I think there’s still cause for optimism.”

I like optimism, but I am also a big fan of reality. President Obama’s foreign policy has been an unmitigated disaster. His latest ‘accomplishment’–the Iran Treaty–will bring a nuclear arms race to the Middle East and eventually war. The Treaty will fill the coffers of terrorists and lead them to new heights of terrorism. Great.

The article further states:

In late-era South Africa and the Soviet Union, where men like F.W. de Klerk and Mikhail Gorbachev had a sense of shame, the Obama theory had a chance to work. In Iran in 2009, or in Syria today, it doesn’t. 

(The Obama theory is was expressed in his 2009 contention in Prague that “moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon.”)

Then again, that distinction doesn’t much matter to this president, since he seems to think that seizing the moral high ground is victory enough. Under Mr. Obama, the U.S. is on “the right side of history” when it comes to the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine, or the killing fields in Syria, or the importance of keeping Afghan girls in school.

Having declared our good intentions, why muck it up with the raw and compromising exercise of power? In Mr. Obama’s view, it isn’t the man in the arena who counts. It’s the speaker on the stage.

Finally, Mr. Obama believes history is going his way. “What? Me worry?” says the immortal Alfred E. Neuman, and that seems to be the president’s attitude toward Mr. Putin’s interventions in Syria (“doomed to fail”) and Ukraine (“not so smart”), to say nothing of his sang-froid when it comes to the rest of his foreign-policy debacles.

I do believe that moral leadership is important, but I question how we can be moral leaders when we are killing over one million babies a year, selling their aborted baby parts for profit, and funding the organization doing most of the work. I believe that we have lost our morals and need to find them before we suffer the consequences of our deeds. Just because we choose to call ourselves moral does not mean that we are.