Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said Wednesday that ‘bad actors’ like North Korea will only get worse under the Obama administration.

Responding to questions about North Korea’s claim that it tested a hydrogen bomb, the Texas senator likened the state of the world under the Obama administration to William Golding’s Nobel Prize-winning novel “Lord of the Flies,” in which children who try to govern themselves on an uninhabited island eventually turn on one other, with a disastrous end.

“For the remainder of President Obama’s term, we are essentially in a Hobbesian state of nature, like Lord of the Flies,” he said during a campaign stop in Rock Rapids, Iowa. The Hobbesian philosophy says a strong central authority is a necessary basis for governance.

“For the remainder of the year, every bad actor is going to get worse,” he said. “Every bad actor on earth has taken the measure of the man Barack Obama and determined there are no consequences, there is no price to be paid. So, what North Korea did is just the beginning.”

Pyongyang’s announcement of a successful hydrogen bomb test would mark a major and unanticipated advance for its still-limited nuclear arsenal. The White House said Wednesday that the U.S. government’s early analysis of underground activity in North Korea “is not consistent” with that country’s claim of having conducted a successful hydrogen bomb test.

Most of the GOP presidential hopefuls have weighed in on the news, blaming the Obama administration for what they described as a failure to take more serious action against North Korea. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state, condemned North Korea’s suspected action in a statement, adding that the incident underscores the importance of the upcoming presidential election.

(AP)