by Frank J. Gaffney Jr., The Washington Times, July 5, 2011

"The outlines of an Obama Doctrine have been apparent for some time. It can be summarized in nine damning words: Embolden our enemies. Undermine our friends. Diminish our country. These days, it is hard to avoid proof that these outcomes are not inadvertent or attributable to sheer and sustained incompetence. Rather, they are a product of deliberate decisions approved, we must assume, by the president himself."

They both know the right thing but won't do the right thing. I know the President's reasons - he won't get elected if he did the right thing. I am not sure about Zakaria

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The observations of Zakaria are clearly tendentious: even before the election,he was so obsessed with Obama that he still tries to find excuses for him, blunder after blunder.

Lets face it: Obama is a weak president. He merely reacts to the world around them, lets himself to be locked into paths where he wouldn't want to be.

- Lack of cooperation with Pakistan leads to failure in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is his war, his priority. Yet it goes as Pakistan wants it - badly - and not as Obama want. This is not necessary a bad thing - I guess its better for the Afghans - but hardly a sign of leadership.

- Lack of direct engagement with Iran left Obama clueless in the Middle-East. Without talking to one of the most influential players in the region, the US simply cannot shape the future of that part of the world. By being too much of a sissy to sit down with Ahmadinejad & co.and relying on good ol' disposable dictators like Mubarak and the Saudi royals, Obama has simply locked himself out from that strategic region.

- Lack of cooperation with China has resulted in cold war-style rhetoric, lack of influence and damaged diplomatic and economic relations with the worlds 2nd power. Obama lacked the charisma to engage in bilateral talks, he merely lets his incompetent dogs bark (H. R. Clinton) and see American influence over its main economic partner fade away.

- Lack of an Israel policy has led to increased tension in the region. One should note that this is the area, where Obama had done the less harm. Wow, we should be grateful, incompetence paid off.

All in all, point is not about international leadership, but accommodation with the world. I don't say the US has to control or lead all the others, but it has to be a partner to every country in the world. It isn't, thanks to a decade of failed gunslinging policies to which Obama has done nothing to fix.

I have a question for you and those like you who have been blasting the President for having a too reactive, restrained, and lead from behind foreign policy. Since you bring up the Arab Spring, I'll use Libya to setup my question. I'm going to assume from your comments that you support the intervention in Libya. What if the only way to put together an international coalition, secure UN backing, the explicit support of some Gulf countries, and critically the tacit support of the Arab street for the NATO-led effort to oust Gaddafi was for the U.S. take on a diminished and more behind-the-scenes role? So, in those instances, and there seems to be quite a few of them right now, where there is a trade off between vocal and visible US leadership and the ability to achieve the objectives of a particular policy, which is more important to you? What would you choose?

I think that this self-confesssed description of the Obama Administration accurately sums up both the (lack of) strategic thinking that guides this inept bunch.

Apologies: strike the "both" from my aformentioned comment.

Zakaria is often wrong, but this paper is just neoconservative crap. Hubris as usual. Get a life man.

The writer's disapproval glows from his "Zakaria's intellectualization of a foreign policy driven by domestic priorities" and it hard to understand.

All foreign policies are driven by domestic priorities, or should be.

Mind you, when the domestic priority is winning the next domestic election, bad things often seem to result.

Discussions about whether the Obama doctrine is good or bad all assume that there actually is one and that it is based on intellectual grounds. I think this notion is seriously flawed. Obama, as his books make impeccably clear, is focused primarily on himself and his personal story. That story is of a boy who was abandoned by both of his parents and left to be raised by grandparents he now considers "racist." The natural response of a child to that rejection is to reject everything around him.

Consider the 2008 campaign. It was based on rejecting Bush Administration policies across the board. Bush had become very unpopular, so this response attracted a great deal of attention and approval. Then Obama became president and discovered that most of Bush's policies were based on solid logic and realities, so he continued them to the consternation of his voters.

Obama's initiatives have all been of the "rejecting the conventional wisdom" variety. In foreign policy, his "apology tour" was basically an effort to reject the American role in the world. There was an impasse in the Arab-Israeli "peace process" brought on by the unwillingness or inability of the PA to tell its people the truth about what the final result will be (see the Palestinian leaks), so rather than working on the PA and the Arabs, he made a demand of the Israelis in defiance of the logic of the situation, effectively dooming the "peace process."

His economic policies have been based on rejecting the traditional American economic system in favor of manipulation by the center.

In social policy, there are reports that in some jurisdictions, federal prosecutors have been instructed not to pursue black-on-white crimes, another rejection of American policy, this time of race-blindness in enforcing the law.

Obama's pursuit of his signature achievement, the health-"reform" bill is also of this nature. He went on the road to gain support of a bill that hadn't even been written, effectively asking the American people to buy a pig in a poke from him, a rejection of the presumption that in American politics, politians ask for support for specific ideas. When it finally came to the Congress, it was so long and convoluted that no-one had read it and no-one understood it, and now it turns out that its only certain outcome is to bankrupt the states, at least those that hadn't had the forsight to exclude themselves.

Obama should never have been elected president. He is just too damaged psychologically to hold such great power. Thus, regardless of what you might think about his "doctrines", you should vote to remove him. The key slogan for next years campaign should be: "1-20-13, End of an Error."

When a man is sick he can not take care of others. The same holds true for countries. The US has a lot of domestic issues that need to be addressed, it can no longer afford to ignore them and hope to remain a world power.

Not a fan of Zakaria, but Green sounds like a neo con to me.