If there is a world power that has been repeatedly portrayed as losing its prominent standing in world affairs as a result of foreign policy flaws yet still manages to prevail, it is the United States. The Vietnam fiasco typifies this phenomenon.
For sure, the Vietnam War was the mother of all setbacks for the U.S. The question is: what happened afterward?
With a public opinion driven by war fatigue, America went through a period of geopolitical hibernation. No more U.S. troops in foreign battlefields was the prevailing consensus in Vietnam-era Washington, DC.
The Soviet Union thus pursued its expansionist designs without fearing a countervailing action from the U.S. Expeditions to Africa with Cuban troops used as proxies and an invasion of Afghanistan were conducted relentlessly, albeit at a cost that the USSR economy could hardly afford.
America, for its part, attached to soft power a higher priority than in the past. Modern communications technologies were utilized to reach out to the peoples living beyond the Iron Curtain to show them the living standards attained in democratic societies. Not surprisingly, people's discontent kept on rising in Eastern Europe.
By the end of Jimmy Carter's tenure, the Iran hostage crisis had taught the American people that the foreign policy pendulum had swung too far to the retreat side. Cue an assertive Ronald Reagan, who shrewdly pushed the Kremlin to engage in an arms race for which the Soviet economy and technological base were ill prepared.
The USSR reached economic exhaustion, lost hope of catching up with the U.S. in the military domain and was contested with increased vigor by the peoples under its whip. Mikhail Gorbachev had no option but to recognize the unviability of the Soviet model and contemplate, powerless, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.
Conclusion: the U.S. fiasco in Vietnam led to a rebalancing of political forces that culminated in America's winning the Cold War.
A similar pattern of a U.S. foreign policy setback evolving into an advantageous geopolitical environment is currently at work in the Arab-Muslim world, with the Iraq War playing the role that Vietnam had in redesigning the correlation of forces in a manner beneficial to the U.S.
Much like in the case of Vietnam, though not in the same dramatic measure, the outcome of the Iraq War didn't match the objectives set by the George W. Bush administration. Suffice it to say that the present government of Iraq has been siding with the Tehran-Damascus axis on more than one contentious issue.
At the same time, the images of Iraqis casting their ballots in free elections after the ousting of Saddam Hussein likely had the same effect on aspiring democrats across the Arab world as did the TV images depicting the comforts and freedoms of Western life in Eastern Europe in the 1980s.
Indeed, all the major pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa -- Lebanon's Cedar Revolution in 2005, Iran's Green Movement in 2009 and the Arab Spring in 2011 -- have taken place after the holding of free elections in Iraq.
True, the protest movements in the Arab-Muslim world have not, as of yet, brought about the results expected. But, did the protests in Eastern Europe not suffer, too, countless misadventures before the Berlin Wall fell down? The yearning for freedom and democracy has not said its last word in North Africa and the Middle East.
Furthermore, as in Jimmy Carter's times, the present U.S. administration has been playing a low profile in the geopolitical terrain, as epitomized by their "leading from behind" mantra. As a result, America's enemies in the Middle East -- pro-Iran Shiites, including Hezbollah, and Sunni jihadists infiltrated in the Syrian insurrection -- have found no better battle to fight than killing each other in Syria.
Such a trend is everything but detrimental to the strategic interests of the United States.
The political and military analyst Edward Luttwak has persuasively argued that the status quo represents at this stage the best possible option in Syria, not only for the United States, but even for the Syrian population. Should one of the contending sides manage to defeat the other, Luttwak asserts, the carnage that would swoop down on the populations identified with the losers would be far more horrendous than what has thus far been seen in that country.
The latest example of a foreign policy mess from which the U.S. acquits itself well relates to the agreement reached in Geneva between Russia and the United States with regard to the conflict in Syria.
Granted, President Obama's handling of the Syrian conflict will not be studied in foreign policy courses as a piece of diplomatic craftsmanship. And yet, the fact that Vladimir Putin rushed to propose placing Syria's chemical weapons under international control, and subsequently agreed on quick deadlines leading to their destruction, is by itself an implicit recognition by Russia of its inability to salvage its protégé Bashar al-Assad in case of a U.S. punitive action.
The analogy with the upshot of the October 1962 Cuban missile standoff -- when Nikita Khrushchev, fearing a reprisal from John F. Kennedy, accepted to bring back to the Soviet Union the missiles en route to Cuba -- is too striking to pass unnoticed.
Of course, Assad may try to play the deception card and Russia may still bloc a UN resolution providing for punitive action in such a case. The U.S. administration, however, has kept open the option of taking unilateral action if need be.
In the Darwinian world of international politics, America ends up outperforming its rivals, policy flaws notwithstanding. How is it so? Economic and military might? Undoubtedly. But what is the motor of that might? It's democracy, stupid -- with the accountability, promotion of ingenuity and built-in mechanism to correct course that goes along with it.