BARACK OBAMA FIRST VOWED to meet unconditionally with the leaders of America’s foremost enemies in the YouTube Democratic candidates’ debate on July 23, 2007. Since then he has reaffirmed and expanded on the commitment in a variety of contexts, promoting such meetings as a sort of panacea for America’s national security challenges. In making these pronouncements, Obama sounds like a precocious college undergraduate who finds himself granted a vision that has eluded elders whose befuddled reckoning has brought them to an impasse.

In Portland on May 18, Obama cited John F. Kennedy’s 1961 summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna among the series of negotiations that led to America’s triumph over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The Vienna summit, however, disproves Obama’s assertion regarding the unvarying value of meetings between enemy heads of state about as decisively as any historical episode can refute a thesis. In addition to poor judgment, Obama has demonstrated that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.