In his 2009 Inaugural Address, President Obama laid down a marker to those who would threaten the United States:

"We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense.  And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken -- you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you."

In 2011, he fulfilled this promise by ordering a daring raid on al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, resulting in the death of the architect of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  Given that the greatest responsibility of any commander in chief is keeping the American people safe, this action, combined with the president's continuance and expansion of many of the counterterrorism policies initiated by the Bush administration, were the president's greatest accomplishments in 2011.

However, lurking beneath these successes are the President's greatest failures of 2011. 

The president's counterterrorism accomplishments over the last three years have been supported by his policies toward the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  His willingness in 2009 to extend his campaign timeline for withdrawal from Iraq and his initial stewardship of the gains achieved by President Bush's 2007 surge of forces created the opportunity for a significant victory in the war on terror.  As the events of the last two weeks indicate, that outcome, unfortunately, is no longer certain given the administration's inability or unwillingness to negotiate a U.S. military presence in that country after the end of this year.

Similarly, in Afghanistan, the president initially appeared intent on achieving a military victory against the extremists that threaten Afghanistan's stability.  His 2009 surge of forces has produced significant gains, especially in the south.  But the president now seems more focused on winning reelection than winning the war.  The surge forces will be out of the country by October of next year and the press is rife with reports of secret reconciliation talks with the Taliban that could undermine the Afghan government and reverse the gains made by the Afghan people since the brutal days of Taliban rule.

Compounding these two failures in 2011 was the president's inability to leverage the momentous developments of the Arab Spring.  As people seeking their freedom took to the streets in country after country, President Obama stood by, letting others, many of whom do not share America's interests, take the lead.  Fundamental change in the sclerotic Arab world has the potential to reverse the trends that led to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the extremism that continues to threaten our way of life.  Unfortunately, the leader of the free world refused to lead.

Great leaders shape the strategic landscape rather than allow themselves and their countries to be buffeted around by world events.  President Obama deserves credit in 2011 for policies that led to the deaths of many who plotted to kill Americans, but because of his unwillingness to consolidate gains in Iraq and Afghanistan and embrace the revolutions of the Arab Spring, 2011 will likely be remembered as a year of missed opportunities rather than strategic successes.

I agree with many of the responses from other members of the Shadow Government community to my friend Kori Schake's assertion that "we have a national security vulnerability of epic proportions in our federal debt," and her contention that defense cuts need to be part of the solution to our fiscal woes. I will thus strive to avoid repeating many of the same arguments here.

My concern about Kori's approach to the defense budget is that it ignores the fact that the Pentagon has already taken significant cuts during the Obama administration. While President Obama submitted budgets to Congress which allowed for growth barely at the rate of inflation, the appropriators consistently cut the top-line amounts allocated for defense, leaving the Defense Department with less than what Secretary Gates had stated was required to fulfill the missions that the military had been tasked to complete.

Critics often go so far as to allege that, even with these reduced funding levels year after year, the Pentagon has escaped "real cuts." Most recently, the Associated Press did this in a story on Governor Mitt Romney's statement that, if elected, he would reverse President Obama's defense cuts. Yet the Associated Press overlooked an inconvenient fact in its "fact check": in the months prior to the passage of the August 2011 deal to raise the debt limit deal, Obama not only bragged in a major policy speech that defense spending had been cut by $400 billion on his watch, but also said he wanted to repeat the cuts. The follow-up round of $400 billion or more in military cuts will now be enacted as part of the immediate reductions required by the Budget Control Act of 2011.

So, the reality is, despite what many of us defense hawks would like, defense has indeed been put on the table for both Republicans and Democrats -- and cut very deeply.

This is concerning for two reasons.

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The departure of Gov. Tim Pawlenty from the race for the Republican nomination for president deprives national security conservatives of one of the field's leading champions of a robust internationalism. Despite the ludicrous rants of Rep. Ron Paul and efforts by some Tea Party organizations to back significant defense cuts, most of the remaining Republican contenders appear to be relatively hawkish. However, Pawlenty's willingness to speak out on foreign policy and to push back against undercurrents of isolationism in the party will be sorely missed. 

Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and Gov. Mitt Romney all have the potential to fill this role if they decide to do so. This is important because there is a void for the eventual Republican nominee to fill, especially since President Obama has, perhaps intentionally, tried to appeal to both those on the left and the right who wish to reassess America's role in the world.

During his announcement of the Afghanistan drawdown on June 22, President Barack Obama tried to frame his decision in the context of gains achieved over the last eighteen months. He also, however, argued that it was "time to focus on nation building here at home," and to "responsibly end these wars."

This sort of rhetoric from Democrats is nothing new. At the height of the violence in Iraq during the last decade, most of the party rushed to wave the white flag. Democrats spoke of the need to build bridges and schools at home, not in Iraq. During the 2004 Presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry criticized the Bush administration for spending $200 billion in Iraq that "we're not investing in education and health care, job creation here at home." Sen. Harry Reid famously declared on April 19, 2007 that "this war is lost."

On Afghanistan, the locus of the 9/11 terror plot, these anti-war views took longer to emerge. Obama after all referred to Afghanistan as the "good war" during his campaign for the presidency in 2008. However, by the time he decided to surge forces to Afghanistan in 2009, his fellow Democrats had already given up on the moral/humanitarian case for the war and were encouraging him to cut and run, willing to leave the Afghan people to the whims of the Taliban.

In July 2010, when Time magazine ran on its cover a photo of a young Afghan woman whose nose and ears had been cut off by the Taliban, many in the media rightfully tried to provoke a discussion about whether the United States was ready to abandon the women and girls of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Democrats put on the spot at the time squirmed, unwilling to admit that it was in U.S. moral interest to ensure that the humanitarian gains of recent years were not reversed. Then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told Christiane Amanpour on This Week that "it's in our strategic national interests to be there for our own national security to stop terrorism and increase global security" and that gains in women's education and health "can't happen without security."

In short - it's a shame, but it's too difficult, so too bad for the Afghans.

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On Wednesday, in response to Rep. Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity," President Obama announced sweeping cuts to the budget to pay down the deficit, including significant defense cuts. In contrast, Paul Ryan's budget proposed last week did not significantly decrease defense spending, indeed it matched President Obama's FY12 request submitted in February.

House Republicans seem to realize that defense is different. President Obama appears to believe that defense is a large part of the problem.

His proposals would cut $400 billion in security spending from the budget by 2023. Two months ago, the president submitted a budget to Congress that already included cuts to defense. The president now seems to think that those were not significant enough.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that during the run-up to the administration's FY12 request, Secretary Gates made clear that the $178 billion in cuts forced upon the Pentagon by the White House during the budget process left "the minimum level of defense spending that is necessary, given the complex and unpredictable array of security challenges the United States faces around the globe: global terrorist networks, rising military powers, nuclear-armed rogue states, and much, much more." Gates went on to say that proposals for major reductions in defense spending would be "risky at best, and potentially calamitous."

Instead of listening to Gates, Obama now is following the lead of Deficit Commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. They, at least, were honest about their goals. Their proposals released last December included "Keep America safe, while rethinking our 21st century global role."

Ongoing unrest in the Middle East and U.S. involvement in an unexpected war in Libya, extensive humanitarian operations in Japan, and continued threats from rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran, should remind us that "rethinking our 21st century global role" is not possible. Just addressing current challenges, let alone preparing for the threats of tomorrow, will be difficult at current funding levels.

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In recent weeks, civil unrest in much of the Middle East has reminded many Americans of the very uncertain world in which we live. Repressive regimes that appear stable one day can just as quickly be overthrown the next, altering the strategic landscape and impacting U.S. interests.

This is an important lesson for the members of the 112th Congress as they debate ways to reduce the United States' spiraling deficit. As the search for savings has begun, some members have gone after areas of the federal budget that have nothing to do with our fiscal woes to pay down the debt.

In recent months, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates faced pressure from the White House to find more savings in the defense budget despite being the one cabinet secretary who has already carried out multiple rounds of cost cutting. Republicans in Congress weren't much kinder. The House approved an FY11 continuing resolution late last week providing $15.9 billion less for the core defense budget than President Obama requested. The House's FY11 continuing resolution would also cut the FY11 international affairs budget by nearly 20 percent from FY10 levels. The debate shifts to the Senate when Congress returns from recess next week.

This pressure to cut international affairs and defense is coming not just from Congress, but also from several blue-ribbon commissions that recently produced deficit reduction recommendations.

As Secretary Gates observed after deficit commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson proposed $100 billion of cuts to the defense budget, these recommendations represent "math not strategy." Several task forces have combined a dire assessment of the impact of the financial crisis with questionable proposals about bringing troops home from overseas, closing embassies and consulates, and canceling weapons programs. The long-term implications of these proposals represent nothing less than a rethinking of the U.S. role in the world even though the commissions were ill-equipped to analyze the implications of their proposed cuts.

Defense and international affairs have ended up on the chopping block despite the fact that the 2010 midterms were not a referendum on U.S. foreign policy. In fact, even in the midst of two wars and continuing terrorist threats to the homeland, congressional campaigns were marked by very little discussion of national security. In a late October 2010 poll done by the Pew Research Center, only 12 percent of respondents said that the war in Afghanistan was the first or second issue most important to their vote, and only 9 percent cited terrorism.

As recent events in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East have shown, the United States will continue to face strategic challenges in the coming decades that will require significant diplomatic and military expenditures. For most Americans, the need to adequately fund the military, the country's most-respected institution, is clear. For conservatives looking to downsize government, the case for a robust international affairs budget may be less apparent.

In the post-9/11 era, funding via the U.S. State Department and affiliated agencies increasingly goes toward civilian missions in war zones. These programs are essential to our long-term success in front-line states such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. These targeted funds go toward U.S. efforts to support democracy and human rights abroad and help train and equip allied militaries around the world. Such security assistance is pivotal amid the increased threats of rogue states and terrorist organizations and allows an already overstretched U.S. military to focus on more immediate threats.

U.S. aid programs provide the United States with tools to counter emerging threats from weak and failing states. Often thought of solely as evidence of American goodwill and values, these programs are in fact key components in the battle against extremism, battling the conditions that often fuel anti-U.S. sentiment.

As President George W. Bush recently wrote in his memoirs, "After the attacks [of 9/11], it became clear to me that this was more than a mission of conscience. Our national security was tied directly to human suffering. Societies mired in poverty and disease foster hopelessness. And hopelessness leaves people ripe for recruitment by terrorists and extremists."

It is also important to remember that America only spends roughly 1.4 percent of the federal budget on international affairs. In polls, Americans routinely overestimate the amount spent on such programs, perhaps contributing to the temptation of lawmakers to look to such programs first when drawing up constrained budgets.

Like any part of the government, there are certainly wasteful programs and inefficiencies that should be targeted and eliminated, but the deficit is not going to be paid off by savings generated from gutting the international affairs budget.

Although the amount spent on defense is significantly larger, it too is not the source of our current fiscal predicament. Oddly, given the now frequent proposals in Washington to cut international affairs and defense, it is not apparent that the American public supports this agenda.

It was, in fact, outrage over the Obama administration's runaway domestic and entitlement spending that drove many voters to the polls last November. It is thus these areas of the federal budget that lawmakers should focus their attention on first. Targeting our military and diplomatic capabilities will only serve to put the country at greater risk.

The 112th Congress faces some tough choices about how to improve America's fiscal situation without sacrificing our standing in the world. Unfortunately, thus far, many have skirted over the strategic debate and jumped directly to the budget cutting. The United States' current economic woes are concerning, but abdicating the global responsibilities of the United States is not the solution.

The conventional wisdom about the pre-holiday lame duck Senate debate of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is that Republican leaders lost control of a bitterly divided caucus, handing President Obama a much-needed foreign-policy victory.

The reality, however, is closer to the view put forth by Senator Bob Corker, who, during the final floor debate prior to ratification, termed New START the "Nuclear Modernization and Missile Defense Act of 2010."

Although many key Republicans, including Sens. Jon Kyl, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and minority leader Mitch McConnell, ended up voting against ratification, the work they did behind the scenes in the months and weeks prior to the vote vastly improved the U.S. strategic situation post-ratification.

New START itself is a rather minor arms control agreement, with only minimal cuts to U.S. and Russian nuclear forces. Therefore much of the debate about the treaty was about ancillary issues the Russians attempted to bring into the treaty or about strategic issues not addressed by the treaty.

In two of these areas, Sen. Kyl and his colleagues did yeoman's work by prodding the administration to improve nuclear and missile defense policy. Through months of negotiations, he extracted a commitment from the Obama administration to provide $84.1 billion of funding over the next ten years to ensure that the aging U.S. nuclear stockpile is modernized. And during the final days of the Senate debate, Sen. Kyl, joined by Sen. McCain and others, obtained assurances from Obama regarding his long-term commitment to develop effective missile defenses.

Neither item may seem like a concession, given that both actions are fully in line with positions taken by previous administrations of both political parties.

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President Obama appeared yesterday with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and received his endorsement of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia. In today's Washington Post, Powell joined Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker, and Lawrence Eagleburger in presenting "The Republican case for ratifying New START."

With former Republican officials coming out in favor of the treaty's ratification and amidst reports that some Senate Republicans may be willing to trade New START for an extension of the Bush tax cuts, New START ratification now seems to be mostly a matter of timing.

That said, the debate over New START has been an interesting one on both the left and the right. Many conservatives rightly highlighted a number of substantive concerns about the treaty in the months after Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed it in April, but some took their opposition further. Former Massachusetts governor and potential presidential candidate Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed calling the treaty, "Obama's worst foreign policy mistake," and in June, a group of conservative leaders wrote in a "memo for the movement" that New START "will make America less safe."

The reality, as I lay out in more detail in a piece on ForeignPolicy.com, is that New START is a rather meaningless treaty. The treaty would reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal by only a modest amount and leave us at levels that most experts agree are sufficient to maintain our global nuclear deterrent. Most of the concerns expressed by New START critics are due to the bungled manner in which the Obama administration announced its new phased adaptive approach for missile defense last year, as well as the savvy rhetorical games played by the Russians in a signing statement they released on missile defense. Fortunately, the resolution of ratification approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and subsequent administration statements address most of these concerns about missile defense and other contentious issues. Once New START reaches the Senate floor, critics will also have the opportunity to further modify the resolution of ratification to address any outstanding questions.

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Several of my Shadow Government colleagues have already responded to Jacob Heilbrunn's obituary for the Republican foreign policy establishment. Most of the comments have focused on the diversity present on the Right on foreign policy and I agree with those assessments.

However, these responses perhaps take Heilbrunn too seriously because a close reading of his article reveals that his pining for "pragmatic Republican internationalism after the neoconservative domination of the past decade" is little more what has become his bread and butter in recent years: neocon bashing.

Heilbrunn fails to accurately characterize neoconservative views of the Obama administration's foreign policy and he neglects to mention the real reason that traditional realism has failed to take hold on the Right.

The problem begins with choosing New START as the litmus test. A close reading of the Congressional testimony of the "eminences" listed by Heilbrunn leads one finding few outright calls for ratification of New START and instead a series of concerns that the Senate should address during the ratification process. Many of them, oddly enough, are the same concerns laid out by Gov. Romney in his op-ed in the Washington Post and most recently his piece on National Review Online.

Heilbrunn also lumps together criticism by William Kristol and Liz Cheney of Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele's recent comments on Afghanistan with the debate over New START to somehow argue that the neocons have a stranglehold on the party. But he neglects to point to any "neocon" position on New START -- perhaps because there isn't one. In fact, the bulk of the opposition has come from groups such as the Heritage Foundation, which anyone who has been around Washington for any length of time would know is no hotbed of neoconservative fervor.

 But the thrust of Heilbrunn's argument, in a nutshell, is that conservatives have turned to criticism of Obama on all issues and forgone cooperation. He writes, "Just as Republicans have united by reflexively saying no to Obama's domestic program, so they are also attacking his approach to foreign affairs as tantamount to a new round of Carteresque appeasement of foreign adversaries."

This is of course nonsense, given that Republicans on and off Capitol Hill have remained supportive of President Obama's strategy in Afghanistan, even as casualties have mounted, and the president has lost much of his own base. Similarly, many conservatives praised the president's decision, several months into his term, to extend his campaign timeline for withdrawal from Iraq.

It is true that many conservatives have been critical of the president's foreign policy on other issues, especially his continued emphasis on engagement with rogue regimes despite any evidence that engagement has worked, but also his reliance on Great Power politics and his seeming willingness to overlook the concerns of allies. Gov. Romney, oddly enough, laid out this very critique at an event my organization, the Foreign Policy Initiative, hosted last year. After eight years of Democratic criticism of a supposedly unilateral Bush administration, this administration has taken unilateralism to new heights.

Regardless of how many grandees such as Kissinger, Scowcroft, Baker, and Powell may support aspects of President Obama's foreign policy, even traditional realists have expressed concern about clumsiness with which Team Obama has implemented what some have called a realist strategy. As much as they may support the "reset" with Russia, this crowd most likely did not support how the president's decision to abandon Bush-era missile defense sites was implemented, and would likely have some critiques about how the administration has engaged China. Obama's deft diplomacy with Beijing, after all, has little more to show for it than a weak U.N. Security Council resolution on Iran and an embarrassingly weak Security Council president's statement in response to North Korea's recent act of war against South Korea.

Just as Heilbrunn recasts the Republican establishment, he creates a neocon straw man. The neocons, like all conservatives supporting the president on Afghanistan, are the real internationalists of today's Republican Party. The fact is that those on the right and left questioning the current strategy in Afghanistan are the ones who would have us tread down the path toward isolationism. Just the psychological impact alone of a withdrawal from Afghanistan in defeat would haunt American foreign policy for decades. It would also damage a whole series of relationships with key current, as well as future, U.S. allies in the region.

What Heilbrunn fails to grasp is that his desired foreign policy (and President Obama's) is at odds with the views of the American public. Americans don't accept that the United States is in decline. They like the idea that there is something exceptional about their country. They have no problem with cutting deals with countries like China and Russia, but they want their President to make sure that we get the best deal possible and only cede as much as necessary. They want their president to speak out in support of those fighting for democracy and human rights. And they don't like to see their government neglect democratic allies while negotiating with repressive regimes. 

Americans want a values-based foreign policy, not a cold, calculating one. This, not a neocon sponsored coup, is why there is a broad foreign policy consensus on the Right today.