American power is diminished by a weak president

EDITORIAL: Obama & U.S. global decline: Year Two

The Washington Times
Sunday, January 2, 2011

The second year of President Obama's foreign-policy and national-security management continued the pattern of decline established in his first year. The unbridled and naive optimism that ill-served the country in Mr. Obama's failed freshman outing gave way to a sense of policy drift in 2010. Even the president began to question whether the United States should maintain its primary global leadership role.

Mr. Obama's first-week-in-office pledge to close the U.S. detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year remained unfulfilled, the upside of which is that it has reduced the number of terrorists being released to continue their deadly vocation against American interests. The administration's related centerpiece policy of trying international terrorists in American domestic courts also hit rough water in the person of Ahmed Ghailani, who was charged with 285 counts related to al Qaeda's 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania but found guilty of only one single crime. Now the White House is on the verge of declaring defeat and issuing an executive order affirming the unlimited detention of terror suspects. Mr. Obama is learning the price a president pays when lofty rhetoric meets hard reality. the rest