The editors at Foreign Policy magazine used the occasion of the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s election as president to ask a “a group of experts” to grade President Obama’s foreign policy performance.   I was honored to be among the graders.

My B-minus was exactly in line with the consensus:  “Obama scored only an average of a B-: five As, nine Bs, four Cs, and five Ds.”

President Barack Obama inherited two unpopular wars and a global financial crisis. Despite mostly continuing President George W. Bush’s policies, he’s rebooted America’s image in the world and avoided most of the landmines. His top-level foreign policy staff — from Vice President Joe Biden to National Security Advisor Jim Jones to Secretary of Defense Bob Gates to the State Department’s Anne-Marie Slaughter — is superb. While I seriously questioned his choice of Hillary Clinton to become secretary of state, she’s mostly been solid. That said, he’s made some serious missteps on the security front with Afghanistan and Iran, and his relationship with Europe is not nearly as strong as it should be, given the warmth with which his election was received.

Afghanistan: C-. Obama carried out his campaign pledge to send more troops and to put more emphasis on the war but he quickly lost confidence and now seems mired in a struggle over grand strategy. He fired a competent general to replace him with another, presumably to double-down on counterinsurgency, and turned around three months later to question his own general’s recommendations for carrying out the obvious implications of said strategy.

Europe: B. Obama came into office with a huge popularity boost and was viewed as a breath of fresh air after eight years of Bush. But he’s fumbled the “special relationship” with Britain and has raised serious doubts in Eastern Europe. See my recent article for a detailed explanation.

Iran: C+. Jim Jones’ pronouncement that we could live with a nuclear Iran was a welcome step down from the previous talk about it being “unacceptable.” Unfortunately, the situation has been largely bungled from there, with Obama having seemingly returned to his campaign trail Pollyannaish view of the power of chit-chat.

My colleague Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, also gave him a B-minus.

President Barack Obama’s momentous election heralded a change in U.S. foreign policy and raised expectations of revolutionary developments around the globe. He certainly lifted the dialogue to a new and higher moral level and promised engagement. But progress has been evolutionary, not revolutionary, because U.S. policy is rooted in national interests that do not change dramatically with a change in the occupant of the White House. This has been difficult for people around the world to understand. Regarding the Middle East and the Muslim world in general, Obama’s rhetoric has resonated more abroad than at home. He must change the discussion at home, not just to ensure Israel’s security but also guarantee implementation of Palestinian rights within a tight time frame. On Iran and India, he missed an opportunity to give Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a larger canvas to ply his skills by handing over Iran to a separate envoy and ceding to India’s pressures to exclude that country from the important dialogue on Afghanistan. Its problems can only be solved by taking a regional approach and drawing in the major neighbors: India, Iran, Pakistan, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, Russia, and China. Restricting Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan reduced his ability to move all the chess pieces in the game.

Also, in Afghanistan, there is no savvy civilian equivalent of Gen. Stanley McChrystal representing the transatlantic view and strengthening the hand of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry with his Afghan hosts. (Paging “Dr.” Ryan Crocker!) And no Afghan voice has been brought into the discussion of the Afghan strategy. There is still time to save the situation before domestic electoral agendas take over in 2010 and then again in 2011. America’s first “global president” who promised the world an impossible dream must strive to avoid settling for the politically possible. He inherited multiple chess games and is moving from crisis to crisis at home and abroad. So, how well has he done? As my high school principal in Rawalpindi, the Rev. “Paddy” Byrne, used to pronounce on most report cards: Needs Improvement. For his high aims but relatively slow results to date, one can give Obama an A for effort but only a C+ for promised actions to date. Overall score: B-. This is an interim grade. The spring semester might produce better results at home and perhaps abroad.

Feel free to provide your grades and analysis in the comments below.

My first piece for ForeignPolicy.com, “Europe’s Obama Fatigue,” is online.

Despite George W. Bush’s defiant “you’re with us or you’re against us” public stance, he actively solicited advice and input from his NATO partners. Obama, by contrast, is saying all the right things in public about transatlantic relations and NATO but adopting a high-handed policy and paying little attention to Europe.

[...]

It would be ironic, indeed, if the Europeans started longing for the good old days of the Bush administration. But that nostalgia is closer than you might think.

Supporting arguments at the link.

UPDATE: As one might expect, this piece is generating some strong rebuttals.

Daniel Larison argues:

You cannot gauge the importance or unimportance of Europe to the United States on the largely cosmetic, superficial and procedural clashes Washington has had with various European states in the last nine months. Under the previous administration, Europe continued to be “important” to the U.S. even when major EU powers opposed administration policy in very public, dramatic ways. To the extent that Obama is losing ground with Europeans, he had far more goodwill and support to lose; in almost every European country, he continues to rate higher after the drop-off from unrealistic expectations than Bush did at almost any point. Obviously relations were and remained far more strained under the last administration than they have been so far under this one. We notice the minor clashes that have taken place because there was a widely-shared, unreasonable expectation that amity and concord with Europe would prevail under Obama.

[...]

European and especially German interests were flatly ignored by Bush when it came to handling Russia. Promises to Ukraine and Georgia of eventual membership in NATO were given over strenuous German opposition. Were European interests and opinions being heeded then? No. The missile defense ploy prompted Moscow to threaten abandoning its commitments under the European conventional forces treaty and elicited a great deal of bluster from Medvedev about targeting Russian missiles on European soil. Was European security strengthened by any of this? No. What matter then if Bush went through the motions and observed the right formalities when he was getting the major decisions wrong?

Most western European allies were not seriously consulted, nor were their objections given much weight, when the Bush administration decided to push ahead with the missile defense plan. In all of the new commentary claiming that Europe has soured on Obama, this seems not to count at all.

Judah Grunstein adds:

[I]f George W. Bush learned to listen to Europe, and in particular NATO, it was largely after he’d been chastened by the failure of the Iraq war and the 2006 mid-term elections. Up until his final NATO summit, Bush continued to talk loudly about the largely unpopular measures of NATO expansion and missile defense. He listened in the sense that he allowed the alliance — led by France and Germany — to turn him back, but it was out of weakness, not out of strength. There was no movement at all when it came to climate change, which is a major driver of public opinion here.

As for Obama’s handling of Europe, I’d agree with the characterization of his aloofness, especially with regard to the current Afghanistan strategic review. But while my sympathies would normally be with Europe on this sort of thing, I do think that Obama invited the NATO allies last April to assume greater ownership of the Afghanistan war. Given their refusal to do so, I don’t blame him for the freeze-out now. That said, Obama’s brush-off of the U.S.-EU summit is inexcusable and reflects a myopic view of the EU’s potential, especially with the advent of the Lisbon Treaty.

I actually don’t disagree with either Dan or Judah on most of these points and think some of the disagreement comes from the provocative  title the FP folks chose.  My argument is neither that the Europeans have tired of Obama or even that Bush was particularly adept at transatlantic diplomacy.  Rather, it is that Bush cared more about Europe — and particularly the UK and New Europe — than Obama and therefore invested more of himself in the relationship.

It’s true that Obama’s stance on, for example, missile defense and NATO expansion is more popular in some quarters than Bush’s.  Indeed, I prefer his approach on the latter and quibble with him on the former mostly on how the rollout was done vice the policy itself.  But the policy differences are  a reflection of Obama’s prioritizing Russia’s views over that of Europe, especially East and Central Europe.   I think Bush was ultimately wrong in his zeal to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO but it was a policy preference motivated by the stated ideals of the Alliance of “a Europe whole and free.”

Those of you in the DC area are invited to attend the first New Atlanticist Roundtable at the Atlantic Council today from 11-12:30. We’ll be discussing the big issues faced by the transatlantic alliance including: Is NATO expansion over? Can NATO survive losing Afghanistan? and What will French reintegration mean for the alliance?

In addition to myself, participants include

• Christian Brose - Senior editor at Foreign Policy and editor of its Shadow Government blog and former chief speechwriter and policy advisor to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice

• Nikolas Gvosdev – Professor at Naval War College; former lead editor of The National Interest, and blogger at Washington Realist.

• James Poulos – Editor of Postmodern Conservative blog at First Things

• Damon Wilson – Director of the Atlantic Council’s International Security Program and former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council

My first piece for The National Interest, “Bush’s Third Term,” is now up.  It catalogs the remarkable continuity  between Barack Obama’s foreign policy and that of his predecessor.

The closer:

Through some combination of political calculation and genuine misunderstanding, Obama campaigned against a caricature of Bush’s foreign policy. Early in Bush’s second term, he began quietly shifting away from the so-called neoconservatives, and the realists resumed their dominance. Paul Wolfowitz went off to the World Bank in 2005. Doug Feith left that same year. After the November 2006 midterm debacle, Don Rumsfeld was allowed to ride off into the sunset, too. Pragmatic realists Condoleezza Rice and Bob Gates came into ascendency and quietly changed the administration’s focus. Obama has surrounded himself with pragmatic realists, too, so it’s not all that surprising that he’s carrying on the same basic strategy.

More importantly, however, despite the frenzy over personalities that we frequently find ourselves caught up in, the fact of the matter is that, like Bush before him, Obama is the American president. While different occupants of the Oval Office naturally have different instincts and emphases, their country has the same interests regardless of who’s filling the big chair. Likewise, we seem to constantly forget, the countries with whom we deal have continuing interests.

More at the link.

Photo: Reuters Pictures.

The conservative media and blogs have been having a field day parsing the bow that President Obama gave before Saudi King Abdullah in London last week. Some see it as a sign that he is submitting in fealty to Saudi Arabia. Others find ‘coded messages’ about how the US will submit to Islam. His act stirs up the canard that Obama is a ’secret Muslim’. Below is the start of an editorial in the conservative The Washington Times that takes Obama to task.

EDITORIAL: Barack takes a bow

In a shocking display of fealty to a foreign potentate, President Obama bowed to Saudi King Abdullah at the Group of 20 summit in London last week.

Mr. Obama later said in Strasbourg, France, “We have to change our behavior in showing the Muslim world greater respect.” Symbolism is important in world affairs. By bending over to show greater respect to Islam, the U.S. president belittled the power and independence of the United States.

The bow was an extraordinary protocol violation. Such an act is a traditional obeisance befitting a king’s subjects, not his peer. There is no precedent for U.S. presidents bowing to Saudi or any other royals. Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt shook hands with Saudi King Abdulaziz in February 1945. Granted, Mr. Roosevelt was wheelchair-bound, but former President Dwight D. Eisenhower shook hands when he first met King Saud in January 1957. Mr. Obama’s bow to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques does not help his image with those who believe he is secretly a Muslim, and why he chose to bow only to the Saudi King and not to any other royals remains unexplained.
…

The fact is that Obama made a mistake. It is US diplomatic usage, dating from the days in which American broke away from the crowns of Europe, that Americans do not bow (or curtsy, as the case may be) to royalty, no matter who the American, no matter who the royalty. The thinking behind this is that an American, as a member of the Republic, is equal to any crowned or ennobled figure. It’s a custom; it’s a tradition; it’s a political statement. It is not a law, however.

Not bowing, however, does not mean that showing signs of respect are inappropriate. A ‘head bow’, inclining the head in the direction of the person being honored, is appropriate and is the norm in diplomacy. Obama over did it, perhaps, but he did not put the US in fealty to Saudi Arabia!

I’ll leave to the discerning student to analyze why a bow from the waist to, let’s say, a Japanese businessman is deemed perfectly okay while opprobrium and disdain are being heaped on Obama here. Correct answers should include hysteria, Islamophobia, and just plain loony-tunes thinking. Frank Gaffney, I’m looking at you…

Cross-posted at Crossroads Arabia.

Matthew Yglesias published Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats way back in April but some of the reviews are just now hitting the ‘net.

Jim Henley’s is in Reason and entitled, “Between Iraq and a Soft Place – Democrats counter with a kinder, gentler interventionism.”  My own, which hit the print edition of The New Individualist weeks ago, is now available online under the title “Politics at the Water’s Edge.”

Interestingly, our takes are quite similar:  The book is provocative, well-written, and does a good job synthesizing recent political history but fails at its prescriptive goals by glossing over the shared flaws of the neoconservatism he hates and the liberal interventionism he champions.

Both reviews — and the book itelf — are worth a look.

Over at New Atlanticist, I argue in “American Elections and UK Relations,” against the notion that Americans or Europeans should expect much to change in our international relationship simply because there will soon be a new occupant in the White House.   Instead, as always, events and the perceived interests of the actors involved will dictate the outcome.

In “Don’t Know Much About Foreign Policy,” I address Cernig’s concern that Americans are largely uninterested in world affairs with a Seinfeldian not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The Associated Press is backing down on its attempt to use the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to stop the Drudge Retort from using short excerpts of its content after a major backlash in the blogosphere. (See Jeff Jarvis, Cernig, Michael Arrington, and others for background.)

Saul Hansell reports the AP’s modified stance in today’s NYT:

The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.

[...]

Mr. Kennedy said the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group, and others. He said he hopes that these discussions can all occur this week so that guidelines can be released soon.

Still, [Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P.] said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones. “Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

Even if The A.P. sets standards, bloggers could choose to use more content than its standards permit, and then The A.P. would have to decide whether to take legal action against them. One important legal test of whether an excerpt exceeds fair use is if it causes financial harm to the copyright owner.

“The principal question is whether the excerpt is a substitute for the story, or some established adaptation of the story,” said Timothy Wu, a professor at the Columbia Law School. Mr. Wu said that the case is not clear-cut, but he believes that The A.P. is likely to lose a court case to assert a claim on that issue. “It’s hard to see how the Drudge Retort ‘first few lines’ is a substitute for the story,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Kennedy argued, however, that The Associated Press believes that in some cases, the essence of an article can be encapsulated in very few words. “As content creators, we firmly believe that everything we create, from video footage all the way down to a structured headline, is creative content that has value,” he said.

While most of my blogging brethren are outraged at this and there is an organized effort to boycott AP content on blogs, I’m actually surprised that this action is so late in coming. I’ve worried for years that the lengthy excerpts I use on OTB could be ruled to exceed “fair use” but relied on the notion that I was adding enough commentary to create a transformative work. Practically speaking, however, few bloggers have the deep pockets to fight a massive organization like the AP in court.

I happened to discuss this a bit with Media Bloggers Association (MBA) president Bob Cox over the weekend during a phone call on an unrelated matter. As he points out, bloggers like myself are frustrated over the scourge of scraper blogs which republish our content automatically in order to generate revenue. Those sites often wind up higher ranked in the search engines than the original content and thus cheat us out of ad impressions and thus income.

Quite often, blog posts — including those at OTB — that build from content created by the AP, NYT, WaPo, and others will wind up ranked higher in Google than the original content. This is due to the inter-linking that blogs do, the nature of permalinks, and a variety of factors that I don’t truly understand. It’s not hard to see why the AP would be irritated by that fact. If someone looking for information on the latest breaking news winds up at a blog that’s excerpting AP content rather than on a site displaying advertising that the AP is getting paid for, we’re costing them money.

At the same time, recirculating and commenting upon their content — so long as we link to the original — undoubtedly drives content to the AP’s affiliated sites and creates an additional audience for their work. What the trade-off is, exactly, I don’t know.

I, for one, would like to see some consensus build up on what constitutes “fair use” in the Internet age. My preference would be that they be established by organizations like the MBA (of which I’m a board member) working in cooperation with major media outlets such as the AP rather than via the courts, regulatory agencies, or Congress. Jeff Jarvis is right that it’s almost impossible to create a one-size-fits-all definition based on number of words or percentage of the total work excerpted. But, surely, the original creators of content are entitled to some rights to ensure they are paid for it. That’s not only fair but in the long term interests of bloggers and blog readers.

UPDATE: I appeared in the first half hour of Tara Servatius Show (Charlotte, NC’s WBT) with substitute host Pete Kaliner discussing this matter. You can listen to the interview here.

For those of you out there who enjoy the pleasures of a fine cigar, I thought I’d let you know that I’ve become a reviewer over at the cigar review site CigarJack.net. My first review, of the La Gloria Cubana Wavell Natural, can be found here.

La Gloria Cubana is in General Cigar’s large brand of products, and this particular line is made in their factory in Miami. I actually picked this up at a rolling event at my local cigar store–they had two of the rollers from the factory in Miami and were teaching customers how to roll the wrapper. I learned from this experience that I shouldn’t quit my day job and move to the Dominican Republic–my rolling job was terrible.

Click on through to see my verdict on this one. I have to admit it’s nice to not have to write about politics. As the late, great Raul Julia once said, when you have a good smoke in hand “it’s like becoming one with the cigar. You lose yourself in it; everything fades away: your worries, your problems, your thoughts. They fade into the smoke, and the cigar and you are at peace.”

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight from 7-8 Eastern.

Dave Schuler and Alex Knapp will be joining me tonight to talk about the Pennyslvania primary results and other topics.

Please join us. We’ll also be taking your calls at (646) 716-7030.

You can play the show, subscribe to its feed, or share it with your friends via the widget below:

(Note: The playback automatically updates to the most recent show available. Older shows can be accessed at the show archives.)

OTB’s Campaign 2008 coverage will be featured on Newsweek.com’s new Ruckus group blog.

Media Bloggers Association president Robert Cox has the details:

Media Bloggers Association (MBA) and Newsweek have launched “The Ruckus,” a new group blog about politics for Newsweek.com. The blog will feature posts from nine MBA-member bloggers about the presidential campaign on a single page, giving Newsweek.com readers a convenient sampling of some of the best political blogging from across the country and from key primary states.

“‘The Ruckus’ places Newsweek on the cutting edge of this campaign season’s online political dialogue,” said Robert Cox, president of MBA. “MBA bloggers offer Newsweek readers fresh, authentic content with real-time updates from some of the nation’s leading political blogs.”

“‘The Ruckus’ will be a key part of our 2008 campaign coverage,” said Deidre Depke, editor of Newsweek.com. “We want to expose Newsweek readers to all the exciting discourse and discussion that is taking place on political blogs today. We think ‘The Ruckus’ will help introduce readers to a new array of voices and will encourage enlightened political discourse as the ‘08 race steps into high gear.”

More at the link.

Of course, you can continue reading our politics coverage — and everything else we write — right here at the site.

My latest for TCS Daily, “What the Experts Really Said About Iraq: As it Turns Out, Not Much,” is up. It looks at the recent blogospheric debate about the foreign policy Establishment’s role in the Iraq War debate.

After an extensive review of the archives at Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and International Security from 2002 and 2003, I found that it wasn’t so much that there was an Establishment view — there wasn’t — but this:

What’s striking, though, is how “business as usual” the article selection remained throughout the entire period. Entire issues went by without an article on Iraq or even the Middle East and most issues continued to have the standard mix of articles on Africa, the global economy, environmental issues, human rights, and so forth. Indeed, it might have escaped the attention of a casual observer glancing at the covers (which list the prominent articles in each issue) that the country was at war.

[...]

Despite the overwhelming view of security scholars I encountered in academic conferences and at think tank presentations, the foreign policy Establishment treated the war with dispassion, seemingly afraid to take a strong stand. More importantly, it treated the march to war as a mere curiosity no more worthy of attention than presidential elections in Brazil, whether World Trade Organization judges had too much power, or economic reform in Japan.

That, more than being wrong in their predictions about the future, is the real failure of the foreign policy community. None of us has a crystal ball and our analyses of prospective events are frequently going to fall short. Public policy experts merely owe the public their best reasoning and to engage in a vigorous debate when no consensus exists.

TCS Daily has published my full interview with Brave New War author John Robb as “New War and the Threat to Globalization.”

One excerpt:

Joyner: You say that the Global War on Terror could take down the United States as a Superpower in much the same way that the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s, “driven to bankruptcy by a foe it couldn’t compete with economically.” Granting that we’re spending quite literally more money than every other country on the planet combined on defense, we’re still spending a historically low percentage of our GDP. How do we get to the point of bankruptcy?

Robb: The larger context is that the combination of entitlement programs and defense is squeezing out everything else. Eventually even defense will get the squeeze as entitlements and debt run amok with the budget. That isn’t too far out. Further, the global economy we compete in is only going to get more competitive. Additionally, corporations are globalizing (becoming less tied to the US). Ever watch how states compete for a factory? They bleed each other to death with tax giveaways. Our ability to raise taxes only gets more and more difficult over time.

Finally, with systems disruption, it is possible to single out a country or a corporation for punishment. That disruption could drastically harm that country’s ability to compete on a global scale. I don’t think most people realize how quickly a relative decline (either through slower growth or outright contraction) could happen in the current and future economic environments. Things are getting faster, not slower.

See the link for more.

My review of John Robb’s important new book, Brave New War, is up at The Examiner.

John Robb has spent his career studying terrorism, computer systems and risk management. He has brought these experiences to bear in this vital study of global terrorism. The view is bleak.

The terrorists are not only winning, they are unstoppable. We’re wasting trillions on defense and homeland security in a futile attempt to fight an enemy we don’t understand.

[...]

After laying out such a horrible scenario, the custom is for the author to lay out a simple solution for fixing the problem that could have been done years ago if only the people in power were not so incompetent. Robb offers no such magic bullet.

Instead, he explains that we must simply “learn to live with the threat they present” and adopt a “philosophy of resilience that ensures that when these events do occur (and they will), we can more easily survive their impact.”

I also conducted an email interview with the author, parts of which appear as a sidebar article. Robb argues that the lack of major attacks in the United States since 9/11 have more to do with the terrorists than anything we’ve done. And he thinks Thomas Barnett is far too optimistic about our ability to eventually prevail.

John Burgess and I have written a piece for TCS Daily that has just been published under the title, “Armed Diplomats? When State and Stability Operations Collide.” It looks at the difficulties of integrating the enormous skills available within the State Department into hazardous national reconstruction missions such as that underway in Iraq.