"You're Still a Superpower"

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a top diplomat from one of America's most dependable Middle Eastern allies said to me in July of this year, "but you no longer know how to act like one."

He was reflecting on America's position in the world almost halfway into President Barack Obama's second term. Fresh in his mind was the extraordinary string of errors (schizophrenic Egypt policy, bipolar Syria policy), missteps (zero Libya post-intervention strategy, alienation of allies in the Middle East and elsewhere), scandals (spying on Americans, spying on friends), halfway measures (pinprick sanctions against Russia, lecture series to Central Americans on the border crisis), unfulfilled promises (Cairo speech, pivot to Asia), and outright policy failures (the double-down then get-out approach in Afghanistan, the shortsighted Iraq exit strategy).

The diplomat with whom I was speaking is a thoughtful man. He knew well that not all of these problems are the result of the blunders of a single really bad year or the fault of any one president. The reality is that any president's foreign policy record depends heavily on luck, external factors, cyclical trends, and legacy issues. And, to be sure, Obama inherited many of his greatest challenges, some of the biggest beyond his control.

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The problem is that in seeking to sidestep the pitfalls that plagued Bush, Obama has inadvertently created his own. Yet unlike Bush, whose flaw-riddled first-term foreign policy was followed by important and not fully appreciated second-term course corrections, Obama seems steadfast in his resistance both to learning from his past errors and to managing his team so that future errors are prevented. It is hard to think of a recent president who has grown so little in office.

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More than at any time in the past, Obama's administration has chosen, in a very deliberate way, to concentrate more power within the White House .... More importantly, the White House staff has taken the lead on key issues from the outset, so much so that many D.C.-based ambassadors now habitually bypass the State Department in order to speak to those in the West Wing or in the NSC offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

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It is easy, and perhaps natural, to conclude that the president can do little to improve his performance. But that is not true. In fact, some useful insights into how to get the president's national security act together come from what many in the White House -- not to mention the general public -- might see as the unlikeliest of sources: George W. Bush's administration.

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