AFTER LITTLE more than a year in office, there is a growing sense that President Barack Obama's ambitious agenda for changing America's role in the world has run up against a messy international reality that has frustrated his lofty intentions.
In the Middle East, efforts to revitalize the peace process have so far been stymied by Israeli intransigence and Palestinian political divisions. Efforts to reach out to Iran seem essentially on hold as Tehran continues its nuclear program in the midst of a domestic political crisis. An agreement with Russia on a new strategic-arms accord is close, but Moscow's broader geopolitical intentions, particularly toward states that formed part of the former Soviet Union (where it claims "privileged interests"), remain ominously unclear. Also murky are the consequences that the American military drawdown, which is only now getting under way, will have on Iraqi stability. Meanwhile, Obama's drawn-out and still-ambiguous decision to augment U.S. forces in Afghanistan, together with the lack of clarity on what the administration is trying to achieve in Pakistan, is raising doubts in Washington and in the region. It is true that his agenda for change was (and is) audacious; needless to say, the White House's prospects for achieving these and other goals are, at the very best, uncertain.
Then, it is perhaps not surprising that pundits and statesmen alike have begun to take aim at the president's foreign policy. And it is why Walter Russell Mead (among others) has fallen back on the Carter analogy. As Mead argued in a recent piece in Foreign Policy, to achieve his agenda, Obama needs to reconcile a "transcendent Wilsonian vision" of U.S. foreign policy with a competing Jeffersonian worldview that focuses on the pitfalls of "‘imperial overstretch.'" There are probably some elements of truth in this analysis.
