Imagine you are at Jerry Chabola Stadium watching a football game between the Centaurs and Beverly High.

After the kickoff is returned, the teams line up for the first play.

As the Culver High quarterback is calling signals, suddenly half a dozen players from each team stand up, stride across the line of scrimmage and, shockingly, line up on the side of their opponents.

How can this be?

This athletic chaos mirrors exactly the unprecedented military and government crisscrossing confusion in the Middle East where Washington simultaneously is backing and opposing the same warring Arab and Persian governments or militias, depending on what state is being invaded.

The strongly desired muck in the Middle East — intentionally plotted and created by President Obama — resembles a cat fight among 10 ex-wives. Whom do you root for? More importantly, why?

As the most secretive president in history, Mr. Obama, lover of chaos in the world, has devoted his first six years to steadily, almost imperceptibly, pulling the United States back from the center ring of military/diplomatic involvement with other countries.

This scarcely has been reported, and unless an observer is paying rapt attention, he soon will wake up in amazement one morning to learn America not only no longer is the leading player in the world, it is skating toward second-tier status.

In a shrinking environment where everything about everyone seems known, it is startling that Mr. Obama subtly is defanging the world’s former No. 1 power, No. 1 friend to anyone in need.

The United States has been a world power, daily engaging the rest of the world for the past 112 years, since the Teddy Roosevelt administration.

We fast became the No. 1 peacekeeper, No. 1 guarantor of peace on the planet.

Only laughs would greet either assertion this morning.

Mr. Obama’s teachers emphasized the crucialness of creating distractions, destruction and chaos to achieve their political goals.

Until the Obama administration is forced to concede that our closely plotted withdrawal from the world stage has triggered this disastrous state of battlefield affairs, we only can suspect the president’s devious motives.