President Obama's freshman-year foreign policy was the worst in living memory. At the dawn of 2010, the United States finds itself noticeably weaker in international affairs than it was when Mr. Obama took office, and there are no signs of improvement in the year ahead.
Mr. Obama was elected with almost no national security experience, but he counted on two principle sources of leverage on the world stage: his personal charisma and the fact that he was not George W. Bush. The year began with much swagger and self-assurance, but the result was a foreign policy with the naive enthusiasm of someone who once may have taken a graduate seminar in international relations. Mr. Obama's first-week pledge to close the detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year set the tone for 2009. It was a victory of symbolism over substance that proved to be more difficult to implement than he expected, and Mr. Obama soon found that it was easier to make lofty promises than to deliver prudent policies.
Other failures followed. Efforts to regionalize a peace process in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India foundered on the rocks of entrenched national interests. The president announced a "stronger and smarter" strategy for Afghanistan in March, and another in November that contained a deadline which is not quite a deadline, for a pullout that is not really a pullout.
A lot more inconvenient facts at the link. Read it all.
The world is a tough neighborhood. Mr. Bush was not loved, but he was feared, which Machiavelli advises is a more durable position.
Oderint dum mutuant?
Mr. Obama has sought only to be loved, but in the process has disappointed America's allies and encouraged our adversaries. The world has the measure of the man in the White House, and he doesn't measure up to the task at hand. Unless he shows a stronger hand, Mr. Obama will continue to increasingly follow global events rather than lead them.