Why the Russians want health-care reform in the U.S.

By scrapping the American missile defense system, Barack Obama has effectively "handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain," Mark Steyn fumes. The reason is simple: In order to shield themselves from a nuclear Iran, Eastern European countries will start looking to an imperial-minded Moscow rather than the U.S. for protection, bolstering Russia’s influence on the region. And will only get worse on the foreign policy front if Obama succeeds in implementing his domestic agenda. "For Britain and other great powers," Steyn writes, "the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way."

Orange County Register