For the longest time I have chosen to chalk our President’s stumbles, bumbles, and disasters up to incompetence. He is in over his head. He is inexperienced. He is out of his league. It is hard to accept otherwise.

But it is clearer and clearer that is not true. It is clear that President Obama’s disastrous policies are premised not in incompetence, but in maliciousness. Our President — and he is our President — is not a stumbler and a bumbler, but a Nero who when not persecuting Christians, plays golf while the world burns.

President Obama has surrounded himself with a group of people who comport to his own world view. That world view is very simple to explain: Barack Obama and his advisors belief that in order for the world to be safer, they must make the United States less safe. In order for the world to be stable, the United States must be less stable.

In short, Barack Obama blames America first.

The swarms of illegal immigrants across the border is all part of the plan.

Letting tensions between Israel and Hamas flare into a hot war is all part of the plan.

Sending mixed signals to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and others is all part of the plan.

Barack Obama is setting out to remake the world order. That remake is premised on the United States needing to take a back seat or, to put it another way, lead from behind.

How many people in this world will die because Barack Obama played golf while the world burned? How many Americans will eventually lose their lives because Barack Obama chose the rest of the world over his own national interests?

There is grave incompetence in the White House. But there is also a maliciousness that views the very image of the shining city on the hill a jingoist insult to the rest of the world.

Al Qaeda once sensed weakness when, during the Clinton administration, we prosecuted instead of fought. How much more weakness does ISIS sense as we retreat from the globe, dither on the world stage, and watch our President play the back nine.

It is malicious hostility toward the world order those American leaders who lived through World War II sought to create to foster stability, peace, security. Because Barack Obama and the left have no sense of history and no respect for their predecessors on the world stage, they will seek to undo without ever appreciating why it was that order came to be.

But then the body bags will be some future President’s problem.