Grading Obama's Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy conducted an interesting symposium, asking a number of analysts to grade President Obama's foreign policy. They didn't invite me, but that doesn't mean we can't play along. Here's a quick, incomplete list of what I think the president got right, wrong and what judgments are better left to history:
Successes:
1. Shifting America's strategic focus to Asia
2. Coordinating a global response to the Great Recession
3. Killing bin Laden and the upper echelon of al-Qaeda's leadership
Failures:
1. Arab-Israeli peace making
2. Prolonging a large-scale deployment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan
3. The intervention in Libya's civil war
To be determined:
1. The Russian "reset"
2. Containing Iran
3. The Arab Spring
4. Paring back U.S. defense spending
5. Expanding the drone war beyond Pakistan