Fred Kaplan defends Obama against the charge that he is too disengaged from global events:
No one country can shape the world the way it once did, because the world has grown less malleable. The turning point, in this regard, wasn’t 9/11 but 11/9—Nov. 9, 1989, the date the Berlin Wall fell, followed soon after by the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, the Cold War. The Cold War was a time of dread, but it was also the dominant feature of global politics since the end of World War II. It set the alliances, rules, and measures of power that fostered and fed America’s rise.
With the system’s implosion came a global diffusion of power. Take Egypt. In the mid-1970s, when President Anwar Sadat broke away from the Soviet orbit, he turned to the United States—and, as a consequence, had to change his country’s policies on a number of issues, especially relations with Israel—because he had no choice; he needed protection from one superpower or the other. In today’s multipolar (or, in some ways, polarless) world, Egypt’s ruling generals can pursue their own interests as they see them, consorting with and dangling a number of countries. If our interests collide with theirs, no American president can do much to rein them in.
The Dish 