Timothy Garton Ash, senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
When was the last time you heard anyone enthusing about Barack Obama's foreign policy?
Over the past year, his outstretched hand of friendship has been bitten or brushed aside by China, Russia and Iran. His administration has just been snubbed by Israel. It is not at all clear that his surge in Afghanistan is working, while Pakistan still teeters on the brink. Europe's passion for him has proved as fickle as (we are unreliably informed) Carla Bruni's for Nicolas Sarkozy. His eloquent opening to the Islamic world seems to have run into the sand. The Copenhagen climate-change summit fizzled out in mutual recrimination between the U.S. and China.
Once upon a time, the world thrilled to the Obama chant of "Yes we can!" Now it's shouting back: "No you can't!"
Beyond improving America's popular standing in the world - no mean achievement - Mr. Obama's foreign policy has produced no clear, significant success. Why? Here are some of the explanations offered.
Disappointment was foreordained: Those messianic expectations of his presidency could never have been met by any mere mortal. Rather than being a messiah, Mr. Obama is a first-term President with little personal experience in foreign affairs. As his predecessor showed, the experience of your aides cannot always make up for your own lack of it.
Republicans say his "liberal," rational, compromise-seeking approach invites the snubs from Beijing to Jerusalem. As he himself said in a speech in Moscow last summer, quoting a Russian student, "the real world is not so rational as paper." Democrats say his real problem is the unholy mess bequeathed him by George W. Bush: Iraq, neglected Afghanistan, alienated Muslims and U.S. unpopularity abroad, massive debts, and recession at home.
Others point to problems accumulated over a longer period: U.S. consumers encouraged to live beyond their means; domestic infrastructure neglected in favour of imperial expenditures; a dysfunctional system of government. Meantime, the political middle ground of compromise has disappeared in an era of polarized politics. Historic power shifts mean we are entering what Fareed Zakaria calls a post-American world, where the U.S. will find it increasingly difficult to get its own way against the will of rising great powers.
If you examine any particular foreign policy issue and ask why Mr. Obama has not done better, you have to look at the interaction of several of these explanations. Take Iran. The Obama administration has yet to hit on the best policy. Last year, it focused on the offer of nuclear negotiations, while a huge opportunity for political change was opening, then partly closing, inside Iran. Snubbed by Tehran on the nuclear front, Washington is now investing too much political capital in the pursuit of international sanctions that are unlikely to bring Iran to a negotiated renunciation of its nuclear program.
But if you ask why Iran spurned Mr. Obama's outstretched hand, then you have to look at the legacy of the Bush years, including the way in which the Iraq war strengthened Iran's position in the region. If you ask why China is so hard to get, then you have to recall the underlying power shifts, as well as a growing Chinese economy's thirst for Iranian oil. If you ask why the Obama administration is playing it this way, then you have to look also at the pressures from Congress, and the fear that Israel might take unilateral military action against Iranian nuclear facilities. In turn, the priority given to Iran helps explain why Washington has not pushed Beijing and Moscow harder on other fronts, including human rights.
The results of Mr. Obama's first year of foreign policy are thin, but it is much too soon to despair. America is never again going to enjoy the position of near supremacy that it experienced after 1945 and again after 1989 - using it well in the first case and badly in the second. But all the rising great powers have great problems, too, not least China. America has its time of troubles now. Theirs will come. The U.S. probably will emerge from this economic crisis in better shape than Europe will. It has power resources that few can match, combining scale, flexibility, enterprise, a capacity to tap the creative energy of immigrants, technological innovation, a popular culture with global reach and, not least, individual liberty. Mr. Obama personifies those strengths.
There may be some truth in the criticism that Mr. Obama played a bit too much softball at the beginning, making prior concessions to China (postponing his meeting with the Dalai Lama) and Russia (abandoning the missile defence shield in east-central Europe) without getting anything in exchange. He is learning the hard way. Welcome notes of firmness have been heard in the relationship with China and, in the past few days, the administration has reacted with rare public anger to an Israeli affront.
But the largest single obstacle has nothing to do with Mr. Obama's character, ideology or team, nor with the rise of China, India or Brazil. It is the U.S. political system. This 21st-century perversion of a magnificent 18th-century invention now gives powers to interfere in foreign policy to a legislature that is deeply divided along partisan lines and a shameless aggregator of special interests.
The biggest problem for U.S. foreign policy is not Mr. Obama or Mr. Bush or China. It's Congress. Whether you look at trade, climate change, China or Iran, it is Congress where policy becomes entangled, distorted and stymied. If the U.S. really wants to meet the hopes of a world in which its own relative power is undoubtedly diminished, it should introduce four-year terms for members of the House of Representatives, reform political finance and curb the lobbyists who enjoy what Rudyard Kipling once called "power without responsibility: the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."
Effective foreign policy begins at home.
Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University.