No Plan B for Obama’s foreign policy

I think we all know what Barack Obama's foreign policy strategy coming into office was.

Step 1: Be Barack Obama (and not George W. Bush).

Step 2: ????

Step 3: World peace!

As a candidate, Obama held a huge campaign rally in, of all places, Berlin, touting his bona fides as a citizen of the world. The crowds went wild, as he talked at length about a world without walls (you had to be there). As president, in his first major speech abroad, Obama suggested to a Cairo audience that the fact America elected him was all the proof anyone should need that America had turned the page.

The problem, of course, is that Obama never had a Plan B. He never really thought he'd need one, and besides, he never much cared about foreign policy. Particularly in his first term, his top priority was to keep international problems from distracting from his domestic agenda. He ordered the surge in Afghanistan but then went silent about that war for years. He passive-aggressively let a status of forces agreement with Iraq evaporate. Even his controversial policies - targeted killing, drones, etc. - were intended to turn the war on terrorism into a no-drama technocratic affair out of the headlines.

And the killing of Osama bin Laden, his greatest foreign policy accomplishment (I'm using 'his” advisedly), almost immediately was translated into an argument about domestic priorities.

'We obviously think that if there is a take-away from it,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in the immediate aftermath of bin Laden's assassination, 'it is the resolve (Obama) has, the focus he brings to bear on long-term objectives, that he keeps pushing to get it done. On immigration reform he keeps pushing ...”

The real take-away from such statements, and from Obama's whole approach to foreign policy, is that he doesn't care about it, or he's afraid of it. He issued a red line in Syria until his bluff was called. He's let our ally, the Philippines, fend for itself as China tries to annex Scarborough Shoal. He's made it clear to the Iranians that he considers talking its own reward, since that will likely kick the hard decision about their nuclear program onto the next president's desk.

Such things are noticed. This is the foreign policy equivalent of being an ugly American. Obama was in Japan last week to assure the increasingly nervous Japanese that we will honor our commitments to them, even as the Chinese become ever more brazen about filling the vacuum America is leaving behind. This is worthwhile. So is his tardy decision to reassure our increasingly nervous NATO allies in Poland and three Baltic states by sending some token troops for an exercise.

But while these are good and necessary gestures, they are necessary in no small part because it is only now dawning on the president he should have had a Plan B all along.