Benghazi was strictly trouble on training wheels.

More on that book by Vasili Nasr.

We have a president whose self-esteem and regal taste for power is exceeded only by his naivety about the rest of the world. Now the question isn’t whether we’ll face foreign crises — perhaps, disasters — but which crisis will strike first or hit the hardest.

Richard Fernandez remarks that Ralph Peters expressed the same beliefs in the NY Post.

Unfortunately Nasr is writing under the goad of professional self-preservation. He probably knows, better than most, how bad things are. How high the water in the hold of the Titanic is. To mix the metaphors he can hear the powder train creeping ever closer to the magazine and would like more than life itself to make sure than when it blows that someone besides Hillary and Richard Holbrooke are holding the bag.

His account, however self-serving, has the authentic ring of fear. Still it sheds new light on some of the foreign policy mysteries that have puzzled observers. If Nasr right, the administration spends more time infighting than combating America’s enemies. And it spends more time politicking than anything else.

Therefore events in Libya, Syria, North Korea and China ought to be viewed not through the prism of national interest calculus but through the lens of domestic political advantage for President Obama. Only then can they be properly understood. None of that game theory crap. It’s “who sent you?” The foreign policy of a great state is being run not by foreign policy professionals but by political hacks from Chicago.

Which countries and trouble spots can explode?

1. Russia;

2. Venezuela;

3. Mexico;

3. The Arab Spring Revolutions;

4. Afghanistan (“we’ve lost”);

5. Pakistan;

6. Islamist extremism;

7. Syria;

8. North Korea;

9. Iran;

10. China.

And one area that could go up in flames is Europe. Already rioters are in the streets in Greece. Parts of France are no-go zones for French police. Major European cities are now more Muslim than native European. And overshadowing it all is European bankruptcy as the Welfare State model runs out of other people's money. Those American troops in Europe may find themselves besieged before the end of Obama's rule.