Richard Williamson is a special advisor to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. He served as the president's special envoy to Sudan from 2007 to 2009, assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs from 1987 to 1989, and served in the Reagan White House as an assistant to the president from 1981 to 1983.

In recent weeks, North Korea tested a long-range missile that could someday hold a nuclear warhead and threaten American shores. It is preparing to test a nuclear device for a third time. We are entering an exceptionally dangerous period, one that has us "within an inch of war," according to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

It is difficult to know what kinds of calculations or miscalculations North Korea's young new leader and his entourage might make in the period ahead. But there are other reasons for worry far from the corridors of power in Pyongyang.

The last weeks and months have exposed profound dysfunction in the corridors of Washington where U.S. foreign and defense policy are formulated. With President Obama's foreign policy unraveling, his reelection campaign has been quick to attack Mitt Romney as a distraction. But events abroad may be bringing us to a juncture at which the inexperience and incompetence of a presidency crystallizes in the public mind. In short, we are approaching a Jimmy Carter moment. In a perilous world, this is not the kind of leadership our country needs...