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Victor Davis Hanson’s latest National Review column blasts President Obama for pursuing what he calls a “neo-isolationist foreign policy.” The charges he levels are familiar ones in hawkish critiques of the president: Obama is “leading from behind” and “outsourcing formerly American responsibilities.” His actions “send signals that there is no privilege to be derived from being a supporter of America or its values.”

What is most odd about the piece, however, is how poorly the “neo-isolationist” label appears to fit Obama’s foreign policy—even as Hanson describes it. Consider a few of the events that Hanson covers in his overview of Obama’s first term:

●  The surge in Afghanistan, in which Obama sent an additional thirty thousand troops to that country, temporarily escalating the war with the goal of reversing the Taliban’s momentum.

●  The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, in which “the Obama administration helped to remove the monster in rehabilitation Muammar Qaddafi.”

●  The dramatic escalation of drone strikes across Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, in which “Obama, in one term, may have expanded targeted assassinations by drones tenfold over the tally of the eight-year Bush presidency.”

To state the obvious, this is hardly a record of “neo-isolationism.” That label doesn’t apply even if one grants Hanson all of his other criticisms of Obama—on Syria, Iran, defense spending and so on. It only begins to make sense if your default assumption is that the United States can and should be intervening everywhere, all the time.

The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a “Global Governance Report Card” (prepared chiefly by Stewart Patrick) that assesses how the international community has been doing over the past five years in addressing six major global challenges: climate change, finance, nuclear proliferation, armed conflict, public health and terrorism. Any evaluation this ambitious offers selections and judgments that can and will be shot at, but the report card (backed up by more detailed discussions in each subject area, including which states and organizations have been doing well or poorly) offers useful food for thought.

One of the main impressions is that the grades the global community has earned are unimpressive. They range from a B on finance and terrorism to a D on climate change, with the average somewhere around a C+. The world community is coasting through its curriculum. The dean's list does not appear to be in sight.

Another immediate impression is the relative performance in the different subject areas, especially that D for climate change. The graders probably have this about right. The pattern of performance reflects more attention to short-term attention-grabbers and less to long-term disasters in the making. Severe recessions and terrorist attacks command immediate attention; slow destruction of the planet does not.

The seemingly scripted national response to the Boston Marathon bombing continues. Over the past few days that response has included expressions of patriotism and community spirit that have included ovations for law enforcement officers and special observances at baseball games. This is the lemonade-out-of-a-lemon positive side of responding to a lethal event. It is a reaching back to the larger but otherwise similar communal expressions after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, with Americans now attempting to revive and relive the positive side of what they remember from the aftermath of that earlier tragedy.

Defiance is one of the themes of the collective expressions. It was a theme of a rousing speech in which President Obama talked about how the Boston Marathon would be held next year with people running harder than ever and cheering louder than ever. The message is that Americans will not let terrorists disrupt their lives.

So the two suspected bombers—if suspect will even be the operative word later this day—are Chechens. Nothing illustrates the hollowness, the grandstanding of American foreign policy better than the fact that America has antagonized the one country that might have been able to help avert the blasts in Boston. One can only speculate what Russian president Vladimir Putin is thinking as he sees Chechen terrorists wreaking havoc in a major American city.

Over the past few months in particular Congress has been engaging in reckless posturing toward Russia, which is itself incontestably behaving in ways that are often repugnant. Congress' response has been to pass the Magnitsky Act which, as Matthew Rojansky astutely pointed out on National Public Radio this morning, targets some of the very intelligence officials who might have been more inclined to cooperate with America when it comes to stopping terrorists. The act is pyrrhic, an expression of disapproval that is counterproductive. Russia and America have a common interest in stopping terrorism. When it comes to Chechnya, Russia knows more about the region than anyone else. Has it employed brutal methods to try and subdue it? Absolutely. But it is a hotbed of Islamic militants who also fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now they appear to be heading toward America itself in their deluded belief that they're waging a battle against the evil Western empire.

Members of Congress, as we all know, are fond of making political gestures to play to whatever audience they are trying to play to. In private conversation members can be quite candid about this and will exhibit a bifurcated approach to their jobs in which the world of gesture-making is divorced from the world of sound policy-making. Seeing their political careers dependent on playing to audiences, members tend to be quick to brush aside any costs or hazards entailed in the gestures. This is particularly true of sense-of-the-Congress resolutions, which, as proponents of any such resolution can always point out, do not entail any changes carrying the force of law.

The trouble with this casual attitude toward gesture-making statements is that there often is someone else with an agenda who knows how to exploit the statements to advance the agenda. Even something as legally soft as a sense-of-the-Congress resolution will subsequently be cited as policy and precedent. Anyone who supported or even acquiesced in the gesture will forever be counted as backing the policy it implies, thereby making it seem that the policy is not the project of a determined minority even if it really is. Any qualifications or caveats that are incorporated in the statement get forgotten or are left unmentioned in later agitation by the determined minority to implement their favored policy.

All of these hazards are inherent in a draft joint resolution that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved this week. The resolution, one of the endless series of Congressional love letters to Israel, “urges” in its final operative paragraph

Today, Carl Cannon reminds us at Real Clear History that this day marks the fifty-second anniversary of the beginning of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. After briefly recapping the story of the “far-fetched scheme,” he concludes:

The finger-pointing began immediately, but over the years a consensus has emerged that the plan JFK inherited was a mess; that the CIA “intelligence” on Cuba was an oxymoron; and that if Kennedy was going to approve the plan he probably should have gone into the Bay of Pigs, well, whole hog.

Bad puns aside, this is a fair assessment of how much of a disaster the operation was from start to finish, and how poorly conceived the plan was. As historian Robert Dallek wrote in reviewing newly declassified documents in 2011, even “the CIA task force in charge of the paramilitary assault did not believe it could succeed without becoming an open invasion supported by the U.S. military.”

Reactions to the bombs at the Boston Marathon have quickly fallen into a familiar pattern. It is as if there were a manual that politicians, journalists and others involved in the reacting pull off the shelf after any terrorist attack to help them script their comments and their questions. There are, first of all, ritual denunciations that use a well-worn vocabulary. Every terrorist attack is labeled as “cowardly,” as President Obama labeled this one, even though that is one of the less appropriate of a plethora of negative adjectives that could be applied to terrorist attacks. Different terrorist operations require different degrees of moxie or courage, but with most of them cowardice on the part of the perpetrators is not a dominant characteristic, or even a characteristic at all.

Also in the early hours after a terrorist incident there are aggressive efforts in the media to offer explanations that ought to await a thorough investigation, even though the real investigation is barely getting under way. Of course, journalists gotta do what they gotta do on any story with high public salience. And there is some informative analysis that is offered despite the paucity of early hard information, especially comments about how, in general, investigations of terrorist incidents tend to proceed. Much of the quickly generated commentary in the media, however, consists of speculation that outruns the available facts. It is over-analysis, which is not helpful to public understanding.

You may feel strongly about a particular public policy issue. What happens when you find yourself opposed by members of the political party who should be your ideological kin? You might feel betrayed. Maybe even enough to conclude that these dissenters must have been corrupted by the system—and that political institutions are the real source of obstruction.

Legislation proposed this week by Senators Joe Manchin (D.-W.V.) and Pat Toomey (R.-Pa.) to strengthen background checks on gun purchases may be a reasonable measure. But opposition from senators who some call "Red State Democrats"—from small states like North Dakota, Montana, Wymoming and Alaska—may hold up the Toomey-Manchin bill. The New Republic's Alec MacGillis is upset with these turncoats. He's also concluded that the upper chamber is not only broken-down: apparently its design was flawed from the very beginning.

MacGillis, recalling a tense exchange in which he provoked former North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad, argues that giving each state equal representation in the Senate was in fact a "not-so-Great Compromise." Constitutional originalists, he says, ignore the fact that James Madison argued for the "Virginia plan," in which larger states would have been given more representation in the upper house.

But even if he can beat the originalists at their own game, MacGillis doesn't tell us what he would prefer to the current arrangements. An upper chamber in which larger states have more votes might require a dramatic expansion of the number of seats. As MacGillis points out, the population disparity "between California and Wyoming is now 66 to 1." What would be a fair allocation of seats?

With the terror attack in Boston, the debate about how to deal with the perpetrators (or perpetrator), whether domestic or foreign, is likely to acquire a new virulence. As terrible as the blasts in Boston are they pale in comparison to 9/11 or the threat of a nuclear detonation in a major American city. One of the debates that has roiled America is the issue of whether or not torture is an efficacious and necessary measure to combat terrorist acts.

Now a new report issued by the Constitution Project that appears today says that what occurred after September 11 was not only unprecedented, but also completely unjustified. I have not yet read the report, but judging by the excerpts that appear in the New York Times, it sounds wholly sensible. Read in the context of Russia's response to the Magnitsky Act, which included banning the authors of torture such as John Yoo from setting foot in the Russian motherland (a move that he seems to be taking in stride), it provides a further reminder of the degradation left behind by the George W. Bush administration, which claimed to be advancing democracy while acting undemocratically. The point would seem to be simple: you can't purport to stand for human rights abroad even as you systematically violate them. This legacy continues to haunt the CIA, which was suborned into acting illegally and whose new chief, John Brennan, now claims he can't really remember with any degree of exactitude what he did or did not witness during the Bush years.

Salam Fayyad has been just about everything that U.S. administrations could have hoped for in a Palestinian prime minister. The American-educated economist is competent, honest and moderate. In his six years as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority he made admirable progress in instilling order in the bureaucracy that he led. It is no surprise that the Obama administration and Secretary of State Kerry tried hard, ultimately unsuccessfully, to keep him in the job. For similar reasons the Israelis were happy to have him around.