What did you expect?

I guess if you want to be sanguine about things, that's your business...but Russia is practicing/simulating a nuclear attack on Poland; say what you want about Dubya, but I don't think the Russians would've had the balls for it with him still in office...

Given the obstructionism of the Republican party and the intractability of some of the main international issues, I'd say Obama has done reasonably well so far. Too early to really tell, though.

If you're going to give out grades to a President before he's been in office a year, you ought to base them mostly on how he makes policy rather than on whether his policy has succeeded or failed.

It's almost always way too soon to determine the latter question, no matter who the President is. President Obama gets a lot of credit at home and abroad because he is not George Bush, which he does not deserve (because anyone elected last year would have been not George Bush) and a lot of criticism because he hasn't shown he can solve the problems left to him by George Bush -- which isn't fair either, because Bush did a lot of damage in the time he was in the White House. These two factors dominate commentary on Obama's foreign policy stewardship, and they will both be overtaken by events within a couple of years.

How is Obama's foreign policy made? I don't see this primarily as a matter of "process," that is, the procedures each administration follows to arrive at individual decisions. It's more a question of how a new President organizes his administration to ensure that its decisions can be implemented and institutionalized into policy sustained over a period of years, even after he has left office. Obama's record so far is mixed on this point.

He deserves credit for assembling a foreign policy team and discouraging open conflict among its members. His retention of Robert Gates at the Pentagon was wise; both Gates and Secretary of State Clinton have recognized a crucial institutional weakness in the American government that forces overreliance on the uniformed services to perform foreign policy tasks better left to civilian agencies, and have taken steps to repair that weakness. The steps taken have been halting, though, and have not confronted the problem in such a way as to arouse controversy in public or in the Congress -- if you know your foreign assistance portfolio needs reform and you haven't got anyone nominated to head AID after almost a year in office, you're seeing the problem without trying to fix the problem. This is typical of Obama, and a mistake.

A bigger mistake is the same one Obama has made in domestic policy, the compulsion to centralize foreign policy making in the White House and keep the President at the center of public attention at all times. I put this down to the difficulty Obama has had transitioning from the all-consuming permanent campaign that was his life before entering the White House to the equally all-consuming task of being President.

Candidates need to exert themselves to get the spotlight; Presidents don't. Candidates can't afford to share the stage with subordinates, or allow the appearance that subordinates determine policy; Presidents sooner or later figure out that they have to do both, not only to give the people charged with implementing policy a stake in the policy being implemented but also to shuffle off public responsibility for unpopular decisions to someone else. Candidates need spokesmen zealously dedicated to message discipline, which means professional campaign operatives most of the time; Presidents need spokesmen able to explain foreign policy to an audience most of which doesn't understand it at all. Professional campaign operatives are with rare exceptions not suited to this responsibility at all.

Obama may figure this out eventually. He hasn't yet. He also has a foreign policy team that appears to devote a great deal of effort to getting along with itself. That isn't a bad thing, but if the price paid for internal harmony is the avoidance either of hard policy choices or even harder choices as to who will lead administration policy it is liable to be pretty high.

One last point: like Dan, I hate the way Obama has approached trade issues. For all my criticisms of the last administration, I recognize that it had Trade Representatives of consistently high quality, people who knew the subject cold and had some autonomy to be creative in devising policy (this may only have been because a big drop-off from Robert Zoellick at USTR would have looked bad, and Zoellick only became USTR because Bush wanted bigger names at State and Treasury. In other words it may only have been dumb luck, but still). Ron Kirk was appointed to appease a constituency and for no other reason. With State and Treasury preoccupied with foreign and financial crises, Obama needs a star at USTR more than Bush did.

I feel that the Obama administration has simply "bit off more then they can chew". America has stretched itself too think politically, militarily, and financially. While I feel that the intentions of the administration are genuine and in an attempt to bring American foreign policy back from the fringes where it has resided prior to November 2008. However, they need to prioritize their agenda. Afghanistan and Iraq are still critical areas. Iran, Israel,and Pakistan vary from day to day. Before we can truly repair and regain American standing in international affairs we need to determine which areas are critical and which are not and focus our attention on those that are critical.

Actually, I am not from the states but I appreciate the foreign policy as it treats other actors with more respect than the US did in the past.
And don't be silly about Iran. George wouldn't have prevented nuclear armament either.

I appreciate Zathras' comment; particularly his idea that any assessment at this early point ought to be about structure not outcomes (the distinction he makes between this and "process" seems unnecessary to me). Also, the point about getting out of the limelight is valid as a generality but not particularly in this case. Seems to me Obama did a good job of exactly that over the anti-Zelaya coup in Honduras. At this early stage of Obama administration foreign policy, there's a lot of direction-setting and not so much implementation. It's inevitable that the president will figure more prominently now.

I totally agree with Zathras about USAID and other unfilled appointments. I'm not up enough on the subject to know what the hold ups are, but they're definitely a problem.

It's far too early to give Obama a grade, but that includes his handling of Honduras.