In his State of the Union address, the leader of the free world promises America will remain on the sidelines as a totalitarian juggernaut advances against the West. Sound familiar?

Every once in a while the left-wing elites at The New York Times experience a spasm of moral clarity. “North Korea stains the record of President Obama, who took office promising to make ridding the world of nuclear weapons a priority,” its editors sheepishly admitted this week, following North Korea’s claim to testing a hydrogen bomb. “Its actions are a humiliation for President Xi Jinping of China, North Korea’s only ally, largest trading partner and economic lifeline for food and oil.”

Two years after the Ukrainian revolution that eventually ousted its thuggish president, enthusiasm for the European project has reached a new low.

Reinhold Niebuhr exposed the assumptions of progressive Christianity and helped create the political theology of “Christian realism”, which sought a more biblical view of how the Christian citizen can live responsibly within a civilization in crisis.

Perhaps like no other Republican presidential candidate, Senator Ted Cruz exemplifies the nation’s conflicted conscience over the direction of U.S. foreign policy in the age of terror. Should the United States promote democracy in the Middle East, or should we learn to live with Arab dictatorships, even as we seek to defeat and destroy the Islamic State?

Instead of reassuring the American people in a moment of crisis, the President’s languid and banal remarks were a scolding exercise in misdirection and meaninglessness

A Christian approach to the human catastrophe of the Syrian refugee crisis—partially instigated and immeasurably worsened by Mr. Obama’s floundering foreign policy—must reject legislation rooted in fear, bigotry, and nativism. We need a mature debate about how to respond with prudence and compassion to this crisis. Yet we also have an obligation to expose the intellectually and morally bankrupt arguments that cascade unceasingly from the mouth of this president.