President Barack Obama's most important foreign policy initiative is his attempt to "pivot" away from the Middle East and towards Asia.
Yet in Asia, some are starting to wonder whether the pivot was last year's story.
The new Secretary of State, John Kerry, is rarely sighted in the region. The military elements of the rebalance are underwhelming. Some of the main proponents of the pivot have left government. And US policymakers are still drawn to the Middle East like iron filings to a magnet.
One reason for the sluggishness of the shift is that it is remarkably difficult to pivot a country as large and diverse as the US.
Arguably, the last successful pivot took place from 1939 to 1941, between the outbreak of fighting in Europe and the US entry into the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
During this period, the US was transformed from a nervous, isolationist, middle power into an outward-looking global leader.
When the Wehrmacht marched into Poland in September 1939, only one in 40 Americans believed the US should declare war on Germany. Flanked by oceans to the east and west and unthreatening neighbors to the north and south, Americans historically were disposed to isolate themselves from conflict and strife abroad.
Congress erected high tariff walls, banned commercial dealings with warring nations and starved the military of funds. GIs drilled with broomsticks rather than machine guns.
The limits on president Franklin D. Roosevelt's freedom of movement at this time were severe, including historical precedent, public anxiety and congressional opposition.
His great achievement was to navigate these constraints and move a divided and hesitant America towards ever greater involvement in the European war.
In 1940, the US rearmed and remobilized. In a deluge of speeches, broadcasts, messages and decisions, FDR pushed isolationism to the margins of American debate and tilted the national mood towards supporting aid to European allies, even at the risk of war.
In 1941, he sent a torrent of lend-lease aid to Britain and its empire and, later, to the Soviet Union.
He also steadily expanded US operations in the Atlantic Ocean until the US was waging an undeclared naval war against Germany.
Between 1939 and 1941, Roosevelt took the US on a long journey. By the time of the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, the US had lost its isolationist illusions.
Americans were united and ready for the fight. The president had carried the country with him.
But Roosevelt did not undertake this effort single-handedly. He called on five men to act as agents in Europe.
First off the mark was Sumner Welles, a chilly patrician diplomat, later ruined by his sexual misadventures, who was dispatched on a tour of European capitals in the spring of 1940.
In summer of that year, after the fall of France, "Wild Bill" Donovan -- war hero and future spymaster -- visited Britain at the president's behest to determine whether it could hold out against the Nazis.
