Obamas last chance.

• Author: Gelb, Leslie H.

Even President Obama's dwindling residue of faithfuls and retainers should not wager on his rewriting the history books in his closing two years. A presidency that began with lofty expectations has devolved into steadily defining them down, at home and abroad. The result has been prolonged paralysis.

At home, emboldened opponents of the White House are blocking spending on the crumbling physical and intellectual infrastructure necessary to stimulate a limping economy and to sustain U.S. power abroad. And while Obama inherited rather than caused many of the world's current crises, his habitual complacency and passivity prevent him from mitigating or resolving them. Whatever he tries to do on the international front will be tethered by an unavoidable fact: his second-term team is not nearly as strong as his first, and the best among them are now departing. Most depressingly, the president's almost pathological pattern of consensus building has hardened into concrete, and the interagency process is all about seeking the lowest common denominator. His priority, as far as possible, appears to be avoiding any kind of action abroad that might detract from his out-of-reach domestic agenda. In this context, it's easy to see why he resists the kind of bold moves essential to fashioning success internationally. Obama flowers in abstract intellectual discourse, but has been defiantly oblivious to hardheaded strategy--plans on what can be accomplished and how. And strategy is the essence of power.

All that said, Americans cannot and should not abandon hope. At home, to be sure, the president is imprisoned in a Vietnam-like tiger cage. His only recourse remains executive orders, a useful device but not nearly enough on important legislative matters. Congress is frozen by the ideological fervor of the Tea Party and by the fear that it generates among moderate Republicans, who might otherwise be tempted to reason and to bargain. Obama may also be on the verge of watching the Senate turn Republican in the midterm elections. Thus, while he may pray for domestic accomplishments, Obama will clasp his hands in vain. Far better he should lift his gaze beyond America's borders and become a foreign-policy president, an arena in which he can act decisively and effectively to inject some iron into an anemic record.

Even lackluster presidents can still act effectively in the international arena. It's amazing, but true. Foreign leaders may damn and disdain the man in the Oval Office, but if they want to get anything done or to prevent bad things from happening, they scamper to the White House no matter what they may think of its current inhabitant. For all of America's woes, for all of Obama's failures, and for all the American power frittered away over the last two decades, friends and foes alike still look first and last to the United States in times of crisis. And the second decade of the twenty-first century is a time of crisis. Thus, the world remains Obama's stage in his last two years.

Obama still has the time and the power to stop the terrorists about to lodge themselves in the Middle East, from whence they will threaten the rest of the world. But he must have a good strategy. He also has the opportunity to redefine two troubled and troubling strategic relationships: those with Russia and with the Asia-Pacific region. The first order of business, however, has to be the terrorists, and that will require something even more ambitious than Obama's recent call for a coalition to combat the Islamic State. It will, in fact, require nothing less than the reinvention of America's relationship with Iran.

Since the 1979 revolution and hostage crisis, and more still since President George W. Bush's preposterous "axis of evil" speech in 2002, Americans have singled out Iran as the locus of all evil. Indeed, Iran's backing of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, support for cruel despots like Syria's Bashar al-Assad and antagonism toward Israel all justify Iran's place on America's most-wanted list. Add on top of this a secretive nuclear program and the memory of...