Believe it or not, events on Twitter do spill over into the real world. To those outside the Twitter bubble, the #BringBackOurGirls protest may seem like some online event that they can happily remain ignorant of. But that would be wrong: #BringBackOurGirls is part of one of the biggest trends in recent times—the collapse of America’s power.

To readers unfamiliar with the “hashtag”—a group of words mashed together with no spaces, and a hash symbol “#” in front, such as #BringBackOurGirls—you can think of it, in this case, as a petition, a way to gather statements of support for a proposal in one place.

A petition is a way for the powerless to appeal to the powerful. If your taxes are too high, you can’t do anything about it. But gather enough signatures and you might persuade the government to change. The hashtag takes this online.

On the night of April 14, the terrorist group in northeastern Nigeria, Boko Haram, kidnapped over 200 girls from their school dormitories. Nigeria activists began using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls to draw attention to the catastrophe.

The protest quickly gathered momentum worldwide. By May 7, the hashtag had been tweeted 1 million times. And so it got the attention of the United States government.

On May 10, U.S. President Barack Obama had his wife take his place on his weekly presidential address. “Like millions of people across the globe, my husband and I are outraged and heartbroken over the kidnapping,” she announced. “In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters,” she said. “We see their hopes, their dreams, and we can only imagine the anguish their parents are feeling right now.” Earlier in the week she had tweeted a picture holding a piece of paper with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.

https://twitter.com/FLOTUS/status/464148654354628608/photo/1

British Prime Minister David Cameron also jumped on the bandwagon, appearing live on tv with a #BringBackOurGirls.

Mrs. Obama gave a good speech, encouraging American children to take their education as seriously as the girls in Nigeria who risked their lives for it.

But think for a minute what happened here. Hundreds of thousands around the world effectively signed a petition. It gained the attention of the leaders of the most powerful nation on Earth, who effectively looked at it and said very impressively, where do I sign?

Raising awareness is well and good, but it’s for non-politicians—those who don’t command an army or a government—to draw attention to an issue they care about. The man on the street or even a Hollywood actor may care a lot about the kidnapped girls, but they can’t fix the problem themselves, so they get involved in the #BringBackOurGirls campaign.

If the president of the United States wants to do something, however, he doesn’t need to have his wife make a video raising awareness, desperately pleading for the world to act. He’s the commander in chief of the most powerful army on Earth. The U.S. spends more on its military that the rest of the world’s top 10 military spenders combined. If the president has decided that something must be done, at the very least he could be tweeting #BringBackOurGirlsOrWeWillHuntYouDownLikeWeDidBinLaden.

That’s not to say that America should go to war in Nigeria. It wouldn’t be easy, and effectively dealing with the problem would require a significant military operation—much more than the meager surveillance help the U.S. is currently offering. That’s a whole separate debate. But what is the point of America’s leaders making protests and saying something should be done? They are the ones best placed to do something. Or are these tweets merely a way of saying we care about these kidnapped girls in Nigeria, but not enough to actually do something about it? If they really care about the problem, then help fix it. If they don’t care, or if fixing it is not really in the national interest, then what’s the point of tweeting #BringBackOurGirls? It may make America look more compassionate, but it also makes America look weak—like it wants to solve the problem, but can’t.

If Mr. and Mrs. Obama say they “see our own daughters” in the kidnapped students and then do nothing, what does that tell the world?

Some have suggested that the president’s intention is to put pressure on the Nigeria government to deal more robustly with the terrorists. But again, America has real power that it can use to pressure the Nigerian government. It doesn’t need Twitter diplomacy. It has ambassadors who could give quite a few words in the right ears. America has plenty of threats or incentives to use—if it wanted to.

The Trumpet has long pointed to God’s warning to a disobedient Britain and America in Leviticus 26:19: “I will break the pride of your power.” Britain and America have the power to deal with Boko Haram and #BringBackOurGirls, but they lack the will to use it. So instead they tweet from the sidelines.

Former state department official Eliot Cohen makes another powerful point in his article in the Wall Street Journal, titled “A Selfie-Taking, Hashtagging Teenage Administration”:

Often, members of the Obama administration speak and, worse, think and act, like a bunch of teenagers. When officials roll their eyes at Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea with the line that this is “19th-century behavior,” the tone is not that different from a disdainful remark about a hairstyle being “so 1980s.” When administration members find themselves judged not on utopian aspirations or the purity of their motives—from offering “hope and change” to stopping global warming—but on their actual accomplishments, they turn sulky. As teenagers will, they throw a few taunts (the president last month said the gop was offering economic policies that amount to a “stinkburger” or a “meanwich”) and stomp off, refusing to exchange a civil word with those of opposing views ….If the United States today looks weak, hesitant and in retreat, it is in part because its leaders and their staff do not carry themselves like adults. They may be charming, bright and attractive; they may have the best of intentions; but they do not look serious. They act as though Twitter and clenched teeth or a pout could stop invasions or rescue kidnapped children in Nigeria. They do not sound as if, when saying that some outrage is “unacceptable” or that a dictator “must go,” that they represent a government capable of doing something substantial—and, if necessary, violent—if its expectations are not met ….The Obama administration is not alone. The teenage temperament infects our politics on both sides of the aisle, not to mention our great universities and leading corporations. The old, adult virtues—gravitas, sobriety, perseverance and constancy—are the virtues that enabled America to stabilize a shattered world in the 1940s, preserve a perilous order despite the Cold War and navigate the conclusion of that conflict. These and other stoic qualities are worth rediscovering, because their dearth among our leaders is leading them, and us and large parts of the globe, into real danger.

He hits the nail on the head, and this should immediately remind long-time Trumpet readers of another biblical warning. “And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them” (Isaiah 3:4). Trumpet executive editor Stephen Flurry explained this verse, writing:

God isn’t talking about children with respect to age necessarily, but rather the way adults are ruling: like children! Read the first three verses of Isaiah 3 to see all the qualities of leadership that have vanished from our society: vision, prudence, judgment, wisdom, honor and eloquence. In this prophecy, God foresaw the near-extinction of mature-minded, biblically-oriented qualities of Christian leadership. And it’s because, in far too many cases, our leaders—whether in the home, within education, or business, or in government—have degenerated to a child’s level of understanding. Instead of preparing our children for the responsibilities of adulthood, we, as adults, are acting like children.

For more on this, see Mr Flurry’s latest Trumpet Daily program, “The Teenage Administrators.”

This is exactly what we see today. America telegraphed its weakness by promising retribution if Syria crossed the president’s “red lines.” Syrian President Bashar Assad crossed them repeatedly. Russia invades Ukraine, and America does nothing. Now it wants a terrorist organization stopped and is reduced to asking nicely over Twitter. What happens when Boko Haram ignores this, or talks the Nigeria government into doing a prisoner swap and thus becoming even more powerful? America looks even weaker.

This is what America with a broken will looks likes. Its leaders see a problem. They want to fix it. They have the power to fix it. But they tweet about it instead.