It hasn't really been a great few weeks for Barack Obama in an arena
where he hopes to highlight his strengths as president: foreign policy. A series
of multilateral meetings beginning with the G-8 summit at Camp David in May and ending
Tuesday with the G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico seemed to yield mainly
defiance, and not just from unruly Russians like Vladimir Putin, who's doing his
own thing in helping Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, but even from the Western
Europeans.
Egypt's generals also seem rather unconcerned about what Obama thinks at
the moment. Only days after the Pentagon announced that Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta on June 15 "highlighted the need to move forward expeditiously with
Egypt's political transition" in a conversation with Hussein Tantawi, head of
the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the SCAF announced a kind of legal
coup, voiding most of the powers of the presidency and legislature.
As they did at last year's G-20 summit in France, European leaders showed
some public exasperation with Obama's efforts to pressure them to resolve the
eurozone crisis more aggressively. Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti noted that
no one has forgotten that the biggest financial crisis started in America in
2008, and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso declared, "Frankly
we are not here to take lessons in democracy."
It's a pattern that goes back even further: at last year's G-20 summit
the Germans considered Obama's
appearance to be a "disaster, in the words of one senior German
official.
The president spent most of his camera time blaming the Europeans (read: Berlin)
for the euro crisis that could cost him his presidency. "Who did he think he
was?" the official asked. "We don't lecture you about your budget
problems."
Much
of what dogs Obama is structural: the U.S. is just one of several big players,
especially at G-20 summits, and there is frankly little that Obama can do to
pressure Europe over the eurozone. On Egypt and other Arab Spring upheavals,
he's caught in the geopolitical version of a rock and a hard place: caught
between two equally undesirable outcomes involving the advent of either Islamist
politicians or revanchist generals.
Ironically,
it is unilateral action where Obama has been most effective: drone strikes and
special operations. But because that is largely covert, he can't talk about it.
Or maybe just leak a little
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