Crafty politician that he is, Obama was smart enough to set low enough standards for his administration to claim 'victory' by the summer of 2011 or so.
Every U.S. president enters office promising stronger ties with our southern neighbors, only to thereupon largely ignore them.
Most Americans have little idea of how far our nation's worldwide standing had fallen by the end of the Bush administration; no matter how bad you thought it had gotten, it was worse.
Some Western demographers have posited, due to the female shortage created by the one-child policy, that China will be forced to field a vast force - as in tens of millions strong - of wifeless men who'll gladly wage wars around the planet to burn off all those unrequited hormones.
China's headlong rush to industrialize was pursued with the most Marxist of prejudices - bending nature to man's will. That's a desperately hard trick to pull off when one fifth of humanity, having previously subsisted on 7 percent of the world's freshwater supply, decides that it wants to instantaneously increase its caloric intake.
In the end, for all of Obama's grand rhetoric on ridding the world of nuclear weapons, history has doomed him to preside over the emergence of two rogue nuclear regimes (North Korea and Iran).
So long as the global economy continues to recover, that remains Obama's No. 1 claim to successful leadership. Nothing else even comes close.
We need to remind ourselves that our ultimate goal is not to reduce greenhouse gases or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and the environment. We all want to leave the planet in decent shape for our kids. Radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not necessarily the best way to achieve that.
Once Europe's colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization's primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century - just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before.
Despite living in this post-9/11 age of transnational terrorism, the risk of death during air travel has plummeted to the point where we now measure it in the 'per billions' of passengers.
Great powers reserve the right to police bad actors in their neighborhoods.
Washington has a tendency to hold other powers to standards that it routinely flaunts - plain and simple.
Run with what works: Sell to the people who believe in you and are willing to take the chances and make the experience happen.
If you can get out in front of people with your ideas and your execution, you'll attract the people who need to be pulled in.
I have long argued that, if China and the United States were interested in pursuing a strategic partnership, Africa is the best place to start, as neither enters the situation with past colonial baggage, and both possess interests that are quite complementary.
An Obama administration truly looking to break with the molds of the past would stop treating Africa as an obligation and start treating it as globalization's next great opportunity, understanding that Chinese - along with Indians and Arab sovereign wealth funds - are natural partners in this process.
America has remained highly engaged in global affairs throughout decades of growing energy dependency, so it's hard to imagine it would disengage if its quest for energy self-sufficiency failed - especially amidst a world of heightened resource competition.
Is there anything about cyberspace that particularly screams Air Force? Not really. If cyber warfare is going to be as all-encompassing as it's made out to be by its vigorous proponents, then it will disseminate throughout the services even more than the drone phenomenon has.
