Has President Obama made a single decisively correct maneuver for American interests abroad? The Bush years delivered bangs and blunders aplenty, so one could at least hazard a plausible guess at the country's strategic direction. The Obama era's foreign policy, even to the seasoned eye, is harder to see. This may be precisely as it should be--the Founding Fathers famously thought that diplomacy required the kind of mandarin discretion that only the Executive Branch could employ. But it does drive the commentariat into a frenzy of overactivity--maximum noise with minimum data--and leaves the public all the more bewildered.
Is President Obama egregiously soft-treading the problem of Iranian nukes? Everyone on the right seems to think so. Yet a great deal of the hard work must take place behind the scenes, negotiating with the intractable presidents of various uncooperative countries, so how can we know anything? Nowhere have I seen a clear dialectical sequence laid out of the possible options. What is doable and what isn't being done? American media commentary on foreign policy has proved as useless as financial commentary before the great Wall Street meltdown. So, enough partisan blather. Let us study the global chessboard move by move, as no doubt they have done in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and elsewhere, and see what they're seeing.
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