Today's Reading Assignment

"America the Weak" is the title of Ralph Peters' latest column in the New York Post. It's a scary and prescient look at the national security challenges we could face under an Obama administration. As he writes:

If Sen. Barack Obama is elected president, our re public will survive, but our international strategy and some of our allies may not. His first year in office would conjure globe-spanning challenges as our enemies piled on to exploit his weakness.

Add in Sen. Joe Biden - with his track record of calling every major foreign-policy crisis wrong for 35 years - as vice president and de facto secretary of State, and we'd face a formula for strategic disaster.

Peters goes on to list a dozen potential confrontations, from North Korea to the Middle East. And, if that's not enough, take a look at members of Obama's prospective cabinet; it's long on Democratic party hacks (John Kerry); Republican malcontents (hellooo, Chuck Hagel) and foreign policy holdovers from the Carter and Clinton years.

We'll take Peters' theory a step further and predict that Obama's first national security tests will occur early in his administration--within 90 days of inauguration--and come from North Korea and Iran. Look for Pyongyang to suspend the current nuclear deal in early 2009, about the time Tehran stages a new showdown in the Persian Gulf.

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If you have any doubts about Obama being tested, just ask his running mate. Speaking at two Seattle-area fundraisers on Sunday, Senator Joe Biden "guaranteed" that Obama will be tested by an international crisis during his first six months in office. As ABC News reports:

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

Thanks for the campaign ad, Joe. For once, he's right.