Barack Obama's foreign policy has failed, but the American strategic mind has not yet closed. For the United States, the West and the cause of liberal democracy, the years since 2009 have comprised a succession of defeats, reversals and missed opportunities. Obama's presidency has left America weaker and the world more unstable than when he entered the White House. With few accomplishments, declining influence and diminished credibility, a dysfunctional Washington is in retreat, strategically adrift of its allies and a fading force to its foes. The principles governing the exercise of US power have become opaque, contributing to the fragmentation of a once robust liberal international order. Abdicating clear and decisive leadership has advanced the rise of serious threats to the security and prosperity of the world America made. Obama's presidency has been historic and perhaps transformational, but for all the wrong reasons. The United States and the West urgently require a return to strategy: the renewal of genuine American leadership and, thereby, a path to the restoration of global order.

After Obama makes a case for how this may come about. Obama's immense promise has proven illusory. Instead of affirming America's singular place in the world, the president allowed the world to redefine and diminish it for him. The leadership lacuna has ceded influence to Washington's adversaries. But neither polarized politics at home nor premature obituaries of the late, great United States preclude the revival of American power. The next president can reverse what the Obama administration has wrought, to advance in its place a grand strategy more firmly anchored in US interests and ideals. Informed less by nostalgia for nonexistent golden eras than a cautious confidence and, even, hope, the following pages assess what Obama got wrong, anticipate efforts to put matters right and offer an argument for change that America and its allies can believe in: a New American Internationalism in the service of a Second American Century.

The other great recession

President Obama claimed in his 2012 State of the Union address that, “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about.” On the core metrics of national power, he was correct: America is not declining.