It needs to be asked if Obama's boosting of avowed enemies of America in U.S. foreign policy — which is unquestionably detrimental to the security of the United States, Israel, and the entire West — isn’t a bug but rather a feature of Democrat foreign policy since 2009

At the dawn of the Obama era, a Pentagon friend and colleague, now of blessed memory, warned me that the new administration was riddled with Islamist sympathizers and related Communist-adjacent types who were seeking to swing U.S. foreign policy in a direction more pleasing to the mullahs in Tehran and jihadists worldwide. Moreover, he predicted the emergence of a domestic front, an odd alliance of leftist radicals, terrorist fans, LGBT activists, environmentalists, and Islamists, all seeking to change America at a basic “anti-imperialist” level. I pooh-poohed his predictions as unduly alarmist, the output of a brilliant mind that was scattered by too many deployments. I was wrong.

Who Really Is Barack Obama? is the question John Schindler asks about the Apologizer-in-Chief in A Counterintelligence Inquiry (با تشکر to Glenn Reynolds and Stephen Green). As you continue reading, remember Abraham Lincoln's 1838 warning:

"At what point shall [we, the American People] expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

I [John Schindler have] been a frequent Trump critic, but his anger at the “Deep State” is understandable, particularly after 51 IC senior officials, the notorious “spies who lie” (a list which included friends of mine), decided to help swing the 2020 election against Trump by denouncing Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop – which included proof of Biden, Inc.’s being on the payroll of Chinese intelligence – as a Kremlin disinformation scheme, when it was entirely real. There’s a reason I’ve taken to calling myself a Deep State Dissident.

I’ve learned quite a bit over the past decade. Many liberals who became my superfans when I was asking necessary questions about Trump’s connections to Moscow got very upset when I did what any counterintelligence professional does and kept asking questions – not exclusively about Republicans and Russia. China now presents a far greater espionage and illicit influence threat to the United States (and the West more broadly) than Russia or any other country, but liberals don’t like to dwell on Chinese spy operations aimed at U.S. politics, since so many of these involve Democrats.

The same liberals who regard any Republican who ever shook hands with a Russian as a probable Kremlin operative think there’s nothing at all strange about Hunter Biden taking several million dollars from CEFC China Energy, a known Chinese intelligence front. (The less we say about the “Big Guy” and his ten percent, perhaps the better.) Similarly, the fact that the current Democrat vice-presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, made over 30 visits to Communist China, with some of his “educational” junkets there being funded by the Chinese foreign ministry (which is the standard cover for China’s Ministry of State Security), is considered a nothingburger by liberals. Anyone asking obvious questions in this weird case is “paranoid.”

Asking questions is the nature of counterintelligence work. Making hypotheses based on limited information constitutes the cornerstone of counterespionage. If you’re not judicious, you can wind up in the vaunted Wilderness of Mirrors alarmingly easily.

 … So, what happens when you employ a professional counterintelligence eye and look at today’s Democrats?

What jumps out immediately is the shocking extent to which foreign spies and extremists have gained a foothold at the upper echelons of the Democrats. Over the past 15 years, people possessing connections and views which would have been show-stoppers until quite recently have instead risen to the commanding heights of the Democratic party. President Bill Clinton endured a scandal relating to Chinese Communist money and his 1996 reelection campaign, a troublesome impropriety that’s been largely forgotten. But it’s not like the Clinton cabinet included people with questionable ties to Beijing and its spies.

Tim Walz and his many trips to the PRC combined with his stated affection for China and its Communist regime would have gotten more attention when Bill Clinton occupied the White House. Similarly, Walz’s dalliances with radical Islam would have been too much for 1990s Democrats to gloss over. It’s been reported that Walz, while campaigning in 2018 to be Minnesota governor, praised Asad Zaman, a senior Muslim cleric, as a “master teacher” among other accolades. Inconveniently, Zaman has pushed blatant Nazi propaganda and considered the Oct. 7 HAMAS attack on Israel a marvelous act of liberation rather than a massive war crime. Worse, Walz has hosted Zaman several times as Minnesota governor, giving $100,000 in state funds to Zaman’s organization. … Why Tim Walz is Zaman’s buddy demands an answer.

Take the case of Maher Bitar, who’s currently serving as coordinator for intelligence on the National Security Council. In other words, Bitar is the top White House official responsible for collaboration with the Intelligence Community. As such, Bitar has access to every IC secret. … While at Georgetown, Bitar held a leadership role in Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical group that can be charitably termed anti-Zionist. SJP, which boasts chapters on dozens of college campuses across the country, is another Brotherhood front that loathes Jews (and the West generally). 

 … The Beltway rumor mill has it that, if Democrats win the election, Bitar will hold a top national security post in a President Harris administration, perhaps even National Security Adviser.

How did we get to this place, which from any counterintelligence viewpoint looks highly alarming (plus pretty bonkers)? Individuals with ties to FTOs like HAMAS, no matter how tenebrous, are not supposed to possess any security clearances, much less occupy senior security jobs in Washington, DC. Where did this all go wrong?

What happened was Barack Hussein Obama.

It’s now painfully clear that since Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, he and his people have been running the Democratic party at the top levels. The mainstream media isn’t bothering to elide this any longer. Cadres decide everything, per Stalin’s sagacious mantra, and Obama’s chosen cadres have run the show during President Joe Biden’s presidency (since Biden was suffering from age-related decline from early in his presidency, which became impossible to hide over the last year, it’s worth pondering how much Joe was really commander-in-chief at all: but that’s another matter for another time). We should expect the same cadres will be running things if we get President Kamala Harris. Obama-Biden will then become Obama-Biden-Harris: OBH, if you like. There’s been remarkable continuity in personnel across these administrations, especially in the national security arena, which is no accident.

It's time to confront the difficult reality that Team OBH in its foreign policy has boosted avowed enemies of the United States like the Islamic Republic of Iran plus radical Islamists of many stripes, all of which have ample American blood on their hands. Why? It needs to be asked if such an outcome, which is unquestionably detrimental to the security of the United States, Israel, and the entire West, isn’t a bug but rather a feature of Democrat foreign policy since 2009.

What we can state confidently about Barack Obama is that he grew up in an international and multicultural milieu where “anti-imperialist” rhetoric was de rigueur. His youthful mentor was a Stalin-loving Communist Party member. During his 1980s student days, Obama engaged in the usual left-wing protesting (apartheid South Africa was a big issue then). He always had an affection for Islam, probably due to the father he never really knew. Obama’s political career was launched with the support of a prominent domestic terrorist. In all, from a counterintelligence perspective, it doesn’t amount to much except inviting more questions. It’s revealing that Obama’s own biographer, a Pulitzer-winning liberal, deemed his subject “not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.”

We then must judge Obama based on his policy. That’s concrete. Take Iran, a country which loomed oddly large in American foreign policy during Obama’s presidency, culminating his 2015 “Iran Deal,” formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. (It’s also the regime that’s currently trying to influence our election and assassinate Donald Trump.) JCPOA was the crowning achievement of Obama’s foreign policy, at least in his own mind, and his administration sacrificed a great deal on other fronts to get it. It helped that the media was so naïve and pliant

 … Therefore, Obama and Biden’s counterintelligence problems with Iran and Islamism will surely carry over into any Harris administration. The current case of Ariane Tabatabai is illustrative. Another Friend of Tehran, Tabatabai still occupies a highly sensitive senior Pentagon position with TOPSECRET//SCI clearances, despite apparently being an agent of Tehran. As this newsletter recently reported, Tabatabai remains on the job inside one of the most secretive Pentagon offices, even though her connections to an Iranian intelligence front were publicly exposed last year.

 … [The] detailed IRGC dossier [on Iran's nuclear weapons program] was the Wrong Narrative as far as the Obama administration was concerned, it might jeopardize their precious Iran Deal, thus it had to not exist. Therefore, it never existed. Until I went whistleblower right here.

Political influence on intelligence analysis is one thing. And a serious problem. The Trump administration was accused of this, asking IC analysts to spin information in a manner more pleasing to the White House. Neither was Team Trump the first administration to demand such “massaged” intelligence analysis. What the Obama White House did in [the case of the secret dossier ] is far more serious, amounting to political influence on intelligence collection. Don’t bring us intelligence we don’t want to see, at any level: that’s an order. As far as I know – as a spook but also historian who’s read (and authored) highly classified internal histories of CIA, NSA, and other U.S. intelligence agencies never seen by the public, I think I would know – no other White House has done this.

Only Obama did this. Which makes Barack Obama a worse abuser of American intelligence than Donald Trump – or any other president. A dozen years ago I learned, to my horror, that the fix was in. The fix was always in.

Therefore, I ask again: Who really is Barack Obama?

America has always been the secret ingredient of European integration

Forget Jean Monnet. When it comes to naming founding fathers for the EU, the list should start with President Harry Truman.

The EU: Made in America (America is an engine of European integration, intentionally or not) is the title of an Economist piece a few years ago.

One American innovation from [20th-century America] receives [little] attention: the European Union.

The EU is an American creation, as much as a European one. In the middle of the 20th century, there were more European federalists in Washington than in Brussels. Senators bashed out resolutions declaring: “Congress favours the creation of a United States of Europe.” The Marshall Plan, a torrent of post-war funding for the crippled continent, came on the condition that European countries meld themselves together. George Kennan, an American diplomat, summed up American policy: “We hoped to force the Europeans to think like Europeans, and not like nationalists.” Forget Jean Monnet. When it comes to naming founding fathers for the EU, the list should start with President Harry Truman.

 … America has always been the secret ingredient of European integration. In the aftermath of the second world war, unifying Europe made sense for America. A divided continent could hardly resist Soviet domination. Nor would it be able to fix the “German problem” that had resulted in two wars in three decades. Instead, in a novel experiment by a victorious power, America opted to try to unite a traumatised continent, even though it could be a potential rival.

Skip forward 70 years and America is now a more subtle force for European unity. State-building can be a messy business, but American history provides one of the few guides for creating a continent-sized democracy. 

 … The EU still falls far short of the federal mini-me imagined by the likes of Marshall, Kennan and Truman.

  … On paper, America wants a more capable EU. In practice, it may find such a development unsettling. At the turn of the century, the euro was talked of as a rival to the dollar. The euro’s near-collapse a decade later put paid to that idea. A stable euro zone with the ability to issue collective debt at will would be a much stronger potential challenger to the dollar’s supremacy. Where the EU does have power, such as over competition policy or privacy rules, it has delighted in whacking American firms. Such areas are rare but becoming less so. A more unified EU is a more powerful one and, almost inherently, a more independent one. America may, with time, come to regret what it has wrought.