Obama was never going to stop Iran from going nuclear, but his promises gave people who should have known better, including American Jewish leaders and the Prime Minister of Israel, the idea that he would stand firm.

“Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama said last year. “Rest assured that the Iranian government will know our resolve and that our coordination with Israel will continue.”

Instead Obama reached a secret deal to relax Iran sanctions and accept an Iranian nuclear program while cutting Israel out of the loop.

Despite the anger and outrage, this isn’t the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario would have been if Obama had kept stringing everyone along, adding a little bit of sanctions here and there, while quietly eliminating them under the table, and playing for time until Iran actually detonated a nuke.

Now Obama has made it clear that he will do nothing to stop Iran from going nuclear.

Israel and Saudi Arabia have both issued statements making it clear that they will not accept an Iranian bomb. And unlike Obama, they actually mean it. What they will do about it is another question, but now they, and everyone on the firing line, knows that Obama will do nothing and that sets them free to act.

Iran is in the North Korean cycle of nuclear development, useless sanctions, pointed threats and worthless deals. If the cycle continues, Iran will detonate a nuclear weapon and then it will pass nuclear technology into the hands of terrorists. And the next step is the mass murder of millions.

This trickledown effect was why China should not have been allowed to go nuclear, why North Korea should not have been allowed to go nuclear and why Pakistan should not have been allowed to go nuclear. The process that began with the Atom Bomb spies helping the USSR go nuclear has kept moving forward allowing smaller and more erratic players to be able to kill millions with the push of a button.

Iran may launch a nuclear missile or it may turn over weapons to terrorists who will do the dirty work while it plays innocent. And once a terrorist group goes nuclear; it will be able to choose its own targets.

Despite Iran’s religious war, it has a history of trying to work with Sunni terrorist groups; including Hamas and Al Qaeda. Saudi Arabia has made it clear that it will go nuclear if Iran does. And Saudi Arabia is to Sunni Islamic terrorists what Iran is to Shiite Islamic terrorists.

Unless Iran is stopped; it’s only a matter of time until an Islamic terrorist group goes nuclear.

All this could have been averted long ago, but administration after administration chose to do nothing, or their efforts were aggressively sabotaged by their own diplomats and intelligence agents.

Bill Clinton could have used the breathing room after the collapse of the Soviet Union to stop nuclear proliferation at the source in North Korea. Instead he let the worst mass murderer in the world play him for a fool while he launched a bombing campaign against Yugoslavian trains, water towers and the Chinese embassy on phony charges of genocide.

If an American city vanishes in nuclear fire in the next decade; the blame will belong to Clinton most of all. Obama is only a coward who blusters and threatens Americans, but who bows before every foreign tyrant. No one would have expected him to do anything except cut a deal that would score him a few points during a domestic crisis and let a terrorist state keep its nukes.

The final death toll from ObamaCare may end up being in the millions if a future nuclear attack happens because Obama needed something to shore up poll numbers that were falling over an inability to make a website work.

But whatever the triggering mechanism for Obama’s bailout of the Iranian bomb, what matters is that the mask is off. Die-hard Democrats will still defend the deal, but it is clear that the only ones who can stop Iran from going nuclear are the major players in the region.

Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler signified that the UK was no longer willing or able to stop the Nazis. And despite its eventual declaration of war and the heroic efforts of its people; the United States ushered in the American world order by destroying the Nazi war machine and liberating Western Europe.

Chamberlain’s “Peace in Our Time” recognized a Post-British world order. Obama’s Iran deal recognizes a Post-American world order.

The Middle East is in chaos because American power has vanished. The P5+1 agreement is a statement that Western nations are unwilling and unable to do anything about Iran’s nuclear ambitions except save face.

And that they expect their allies to live with that.

The P5+1 agreement takes Western power off the table. And while that’s a very bad thing; it also ends the illusion that some international power or combination of powers would stop Iran.

In this Post-American world that Obama has made there was never any possibility that the answer to Tehran’s genocidal ambitions would come from Washington.

There is an old Chassidic story about an infertile woman who goes to a Rabbi to ask for a blessing. The Rabbi agrees to pray for her if she donates 1,000 rubles. The woman replies that if she and her husband scrape together everything they own, they might be able to come up with 100 rubles.

The Rabbi refuses. The woman tells him that if they sell everything, they might have 300 rubles. Still he relentlessly demands 1,000 rubles. After begging and pleading for an hour; she despairs and shouts that she doesn’t need his prayers and will pray for a child on her own.

“Aha,” the Rabbi tells her. “That was what I wanted to hear. Your prayers are the ones that matter.”

Israel has gotten into the bad habit of acting as if the United States had all the answers. If it had gone on waiting for Obama to do the right thing, millions might have died. Now it knows that there is no Rabbi in Washington to turn to for answers. If it is to have a prayer, it must act on its own.

In a Post-American world; Israel stands alone. It will live or die based on what it does next.