Foreign-policy failure.

• Author: Simes, Dimitri K.
• Position: The Realist

President Barack Obama is in many respects the opposite of Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush, both foreign-policy presidents who subordinated their domestic ambitions to America's national-security requirements. Moreover, where Obama has succeeded internationally, his successes have been largely tactical rather than strategic, reflecting the fact that he is fundamentally a domestic leader with a European-style socialist agenda but little or no foreign-policy vision. This lack of an international agenda is why the president may be called a pragmatist, but not a realist.

One result of all this is that his administration's foreign-policy choices often appear substantially driven by political expediency--and particularly a desire to avoid domestic criticism, something apparent in both the president's surge in Afghanistan and his later plan for withdrawal. Another is that, lacking a vision, the administration rarely appears to engage in long-term thinking about the international environment, historical processes or the potential unintended consequences of its choices. In fact, its sense of history seems highly politicized and simplistic.

Short-term political thinking about foreign policy cannot sustain America's international leadership, which requires clear distinctions between immediate tactical problems and longer-term strategic threats. Today, most analysts agree that the greatest danger to the United States is not from Iran, which does not yet have nuclear weapons, or even al-Qaeda, which has been seriously damaged, but rather from Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Maintaining the Pakistani government's ability to control its roughly one hundred nuclear weapons is a vital American national interest; the loss of a single warhead to extremists, whether through a government collapse or through a disaffected anti-American faction in Pakistan's military or intelligence services, could be devastating.

Strikingly, U.S. policy has given relatively little weight to this concern: the Bush administration subordinated a coherent U.S. strategy in the region to the optional invasion of Iraq; both the Bush and particularly the Obama administrations have emphasized the war against al-Qaeda to such an extent that the U.S.-Pakistan alliance is in tatters. Now Islamabad's very stability has come into question.

It is good to hear from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and other senior officials that al-Qaeda and the Taliban have suffered major setbacks. It was...