Steve Walt takes issue with Drezner's positive spin:
Dan's broader point about Obama's foreign policy successes is insightful: the president has done well in those relatively minor areas where domestic politics do not loom large and where he can exercise unilateral authority. But on the more important and more difficult issues where you would have to convince the American people to follow a new path, he's come up mostly empty.
Drezner is unconvinced:
I'd like the Steve Walt of this post to reconcile these arguments with… the Steve Walt who just published "The End of the American Era" in The National Interest. See, that Steve Walt views American decline as both inevitable and structural, which implies that these outcomes aren't a function of Obama's leadership per se but impersonal forces of history. Many of the cases Walt cites as Obama "failures" in his blog post look are treated as ineluctable outcomes of relative American decline in his TNI essay. Which is it?
Good point.
The Dish 