Bill Gertz reports at The Washington Free Beacon that Robert Joseph, the State Department's former top weapons proliferation official, said recently that the Obama administration's failure to threaten military force against Iran had helped advance the covert nuclear arms program there:

"Despite multiple claims that the sanctions are working, the scope and the pace of Iran's nuclear program are expanding and accelerating," Joseph said at a breakfast meeting May 9.

ut 4,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium at a plant near Natanz at the end of 2008. Three years later, the IAEA reported that Iran's enrichment capacity in Natanz doubled to more than 8,000 centrifuges, he said.

Joseph, an adviser to presumed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, said the two main themes of administration efforts to stop the flow of nuclear and other arms has been "an unshakable faith in engagement" with Tehran and Pyongyang and a global push for eliminating all nuclear weapons.

"My bottom line is that both of these themes have actually undermined our ability to stop proliferation, and in fact may produce the opposite effects of those intended, a more proliferated and more unstable and dangerous world," Joseph said.

On Iran, Joseph said Tehran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium increased five-fold from about 1,000 kilograms in early 2009 to over 5,000 kilograms today.

Additionally, the formerly covert underground nuclear plant is producing 20-percent enriched uranium, which is closer to what is needed for producing weapons.

[...] Obama's comment in Seoul recently to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that he will be more flexible on missile defense talks after the November elections highlights "the broader ideological context of the anti-nuclear agenda of the administration," Joseph said.

"Unlike in Libya and Syria and elsewhere, where the administration is leading from behind, in the pursuit of a nuclear free world, it's leading from the front," he said. "The problem is no one else is following. And the consequences are likely, in my view, to be more proliferation, more instability, as the U.S. is challenged by both adversaries and friends alike for a lack of capability and a lack of resolve."Given that Joseph is an adviser to Mitt Romney, one could say that his criticism of Obama's foreign policy is just an unfounded partisan attack. However, assuming the man has his facts right, and just going by the math ... it's damned hard to argue with the plain truth that under Obama's softline, touchy-feely, liberal-progressive, ideologically-based, "unshakable faith in engagement" with Tehran and Pyongyang, and a global push for eliminating all nuclear weapons -- we are in, at the very least, twice as much danger now as when Obama first took office. And things are continuing downhill from here as Iran and Pyongyang's leaders continue to play us like a fiddle while we do little more than dance to their tunes.

Related: Iran Declares Victory in Nuclear Talks