Even President Obama’s dwindling residue of faithfuls and retainers should not wager on his rewriting the history books in his closing two years. A presidency that began with lofty expectations has devolved into steadily defining them down, at home and abroad. The result has been prolonged paralysis.
At home, emboldened opponents of the White House are blocking spending on the crumbling physical and intellectual infrastructure necessary to stimulate a limping economy and to sustain U.S. power abroad. And while Obama inherited rather than caused many of the world’s current crises, his habitual complacency and passivity prevent him from mitigating or resolving them. Whatever he tries to do on the international front will be tethered by an unavoidable fact: his second-term team is not nearly as strong as his first, and the best among them are now departing. Most depressingly, the president’s almost pathological pattern of consensus building has hardened into concrete, and the interagency process is all about seeking the lowest common denominator. His priority, as far as possible, appears to be avoiding any kind of action abroad that might detract from his out-of-reach domestic agenda. In this context, it’s easy to see why he resists the kind of bold moves essential to fashioning success internationally. Obama flowers in abstract intellectual discourse, but has been defiantly oblivious to hardheaded strategy—plans on what can be accomplished and how. And strategy is the essence of power.
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