President Obama was once a fierce critic of the former administration's Mideast policies. A year ago, he thought new outreach to the Palestinians and rebuke to the Israelis might lead to a breakthrough. It did not. In a Time magazine interview with Joe Klein, Obama confesses of the 70-year struggle: "I'll be honest with you. This is just really hard."
Obama assumed we could borrow a trillion dollars from the communist Chinese and then turn around and lecture them on Tibet, human rights, and international trade and currency -- sort of like a debtor admonishing his lender about his bank's shortcomings. Now the Chinese claim that their relations with America are "seriously disrupted," as they seek to dethrone the dollar as the global currency.
I don't think there will be anymore grand deals with the Russians either, the sort that saw the United States withdraw anti-missile defense accords with Poland and the Czech Republic in hopes of halting the Iranian nuclear program. Instead, Russia and China are blocking American efforts to impose tougher sanctions on Iran.
For all the outreach to Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan strongman is still causing trouble in Latin America.
So why is the reset foreign policy being reset?
First, too often Obama boxed himself into a corner by being against, in knee-jerk fashion, almost anything George Bush was for. Yet most of America's problems predated George Bush, who, especially in his second term, followed mostly centrist policies. Old enemies were enemies for a reason -- and it had nothing to do with Bush.
Second, Obama's utopian rhetoric created impossible expectations of a new international brotherhood. So the disappointment became greater when nations simply acted like their usual self-interested selves instead of idealistic groupies at an Obama hope and change rally.
Third, the constant televised presence of Obama on his 24/7 bully pulpit has surely resulted in Obama fatigue. Most nations don't seem to fear any of his deadlines or appear mesmerized by his soaring rhetorical flourishes.
Fourth, the nearly $2 trillion dollar annual deficit curbs both the moral and material power of the United States, which has gone into hock to unsavory nations.
Fortunately, for the country, Obama did not take three years to reverse course, unlike Jimmy Carter whose inaction led to a series of foreign policy catastrophes like the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
By voluntarily backtracking -- or being rebuffed -- on almost all his initiatives, an idealistic Obama is reminding the world that anti-Americanism abroad is not caused so much by what the United States does, but largely by preconceived hostility to the values of liberty, free markets, and individual rights that the United States represents.