I would give him a B-.
One important measure of the success of our foreign policy is the goodwill the world expresses toward the United States. That has clearly increased under the Obama Administration. This may be due more to who the president is than the things he has done, but we don't grade students down for being gifted. Further, the president has defused some potential conflicts, such as a G20 fight over stimulus, a battle over NAFTA renegotiation, trade disputes over Buy America, and a conflict over Chinese currency.
The problem is that it was the president who lit the fuse in each of these cases. There are other instances in which lit fuses are still burning. The president signed a measure that violated U.S. NAFTA commitments on Mexican trucks. He has yet to take action on critical FTAs with Colombia and South Korea. He did not support removal of the Buy American provision, thus sending a protectionist signal against select trading partners. His response to global macro imbalances has been to propose a decade of increased and unsustainable U.S. borrowing. Nor has he shown any great ability to persuade other countries to come around to his point of view, despite a serious effort to do so at the G20.
--Phil Levy
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