Foreign policy adrift.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: Comment - President Barack Obama's foreign policy - Viewpoint essay

When it comes to international affairs, the Obama Administration has produced a series of disappointments. Its record is one of broken or half-kept promises.

One area where President Obama has let everybody down is climate change. As President-elect, Obama said, "Delay is no longer an option" on global warming. "The stakes are too high. The consequences too serious."

But the Obama Administration presided over a calamitous delay at the Copenhagen conference. Rather than press for a binding agreement with stringent requirements, the Administration ran interference for the polluters.

"If Barack Obama had come to Copenhagen with a transformative and inspiring commitment to getting the U.S. economy off fossil fuels, all the other major emitters would have stepped up," writes Naomi Klein in The Nation . "The EU, Japan, China, and India had all indicated that they were willing to increase their levels of commitment, but only if the U.S. took the lead. Instead of leading, Obama arrived with embarrassingly low targets and the heavy emitters of the world took their cue from him."

Bill McKibben has been equally caustic in his assessment. In a column for Mother Jones filed on the day of the nonbinding Copenhagen accord, McKibben wrote, "The President of the United States did several things in his agreement today with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa: He blew up the United Nations.... He formed a league of super polluters, and would-be super polluters." And he took "the mandate that progressives worked their hearts out to give him, and used it to gut the ideas that progressives have held most dear."

On global warming, the stakes remain too high and the consequences too serious for delay--but Obama has lost more than a year already.

Another glaring shortcoming in the Obama Administration's record has been on torture. n a fact sheet put out during the Presidential campaign, Obama's team unequivocally promised to stop the Bush Administration's practices on this front.

"From both a moral standpoint and a practical standpoint, torture is wrong. Barack Obama will end the use of torture without exception," stated the document. "He also will eliminate the practice of extreme rendition, where we outsource our torture to other countries." And once elected, Obama issued renunciations of torture.

But the reality differs from the rhetoric.

In a recent article for TomDispatch.com and The Nation , journalist Anand Gopal proves that U.S. personnel are still using...