Don't grade Obama on foreign policy yet

If you're trying to grade President Barack Obama's foreign policy one year after he took office, my advice is: Wait until next year.

It's tempting to jump the gun and call his foreign policy a washout. After all, the sky-high global ratings inspired by Obama's victory have not yet produced any tangible foreign-policy triumphs — in the Middle East, South Asia, or on global warming. Even an early Obama supporter like security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that Obama "has not yet made the transition from inspiring orator to compelling statesman. Advocating that something happen is not the same as making it happen."

But I believe it's much too soon to pass judgment: 2010 will be the critical year for strategies that the Obama team has set in motion — on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, the Arab-Israeli peace process, and other key issues. By year's end, we'll be able to judge whether his emphasis on diplomatic "engagement" as substitute for — or complement to — military force can produce results.

Critics who deride Obama's insistence on "engagement" are ignoring historical currents. The Bush administration's debacle in Iraq, rescued at the last minute, has sharply diminished America's clout and influence abroad. So did the Bush team's abandonment of Afghanistan (squandering the gains of a successful war there), which permitted al-Qaida and the Taliban to revive.

Obama rightly understood that we could no longer act like the sole superpower of the 1990s, nor can we still rely primarily on force. We don't have the resources. Our military is overstretched and our budgets grossly overextended. And our global clout — the ability to persuade or compel other nations to follow our lead — has been sharply eroding as our economy sinks.

If Sen. John McCain had won the presidency in 2008, he would have been forced to recognize the same foreign-policy realities Obama had already grasped.

Where the Obama team slipped up was in overestimating how far, and how quickly, their man could advance on a current of global good feelings. They also failed to grasp how swiftly U.S. influence would erode as America's economic troubles grew.

Case in point: Iran. In his inaugural address, Obama included this now-famous phrase aimed at Tehran: "We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." He hoped his outreach to the Muslim world, and his efforts to "engage" its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would bring results during his first year. He also hoped that smoothing relations with Moscow and Beijing would persuade them to back harsher sanctions against Iran if it failed to curb its nuclear program.