The next president of the United States will likely wish he or she weren’t.

Barack Obama will have willed his successor a Middle East dominated by a coalition of Russia, Syria, Iraq and a nuclear-arming Iran. China will have ramped up its military to make our aircraft carriers vulnerable to its missiles. Vladimir Putin will have proved NATO incapable of coping with Russia’s expansion. And the price of oil will be rising as Russia and Saudi Arabia realize that there is nothing odd about continuing to kill each other’s allies, while at the same time colluding to cut oil production to drive prices back to $100 per barrel. Great Britain will have completed its ongoing realignment of its trade and policies with those of China, among other things supporting the replacement of the dollar with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency. America will stand alone. Well, not quite alone: It will be a member of something the previous U.S. president called “the international community.”