President George W. Bush’s place in history is already guaranteed, fixed by a series of monumental blunders that no amount of revisionism will ever be able to whitewash. By comparison, historians are likely to have a hard time drawing a bead on Barack Obama. How could such an obviously gifted President, swept into office on a wave of immense expectations, have managed to accomplish so little in his attempted management of global affairs? Over the past six years ‘Yes, we can!’ has become ‘No, he hasn’t.’ What went wrong?

Several answers to this question present themselves. The first and most important is that the expectations to which Obama–mania gave rise were from the outset utterly unrealistic. But consider this irony: the people who George W. Bush had brought to power eight years prior harboured many of those same expectations regarding the exercise of what pundits and politicians like to call American global leadership.

Bush and his chief lieutenants — people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz — had believed it incumbent on the United States to run the world. The outcome of the Cold War, the central event of their professional lives, had endowed upon the United States the prerogative and the obligation to do just that. America had won and winning had placed America — the sole superpower, the benign global hegemon, the indispensable nation — in charge. It was just that simple.

Those most enthusiastically promoting Obama for the presidency back in 2008 did not, in fact, dispute this interpretation. Their gripe with Bush was that he had exercised the wrong type of leadership. Rather than challenging the triumphalist views that had gained wide currency in the wake of the Cold War, they looked to Obama to undo Bush’s mistakes: end the Iraq War, shut down Guantanamo, and forswear torture, for example. They were counting on Obama to restore the United States to its proper place as unquestioned global leader. In foreign policy, this defined his mandate.

But the mandate rested on false premises. The US had not ‘won’ the Cold War. Rather, with the Soviet-American rivalry having inflicted massive damage on principals and bystanders alike, the Soviet leadership had finally called it quits, bequeathing to Washington the consequences. Rather than producing a so-called unipolar order, the passing of the Cold War revealed that widely held assumptions about bipolarity had actually concealed a far more complex reality. According to triumphalist maths, 2 – 1 = 1. At least it is supposed to. What administrations beginning with that of the elder President Bush actually found was that 2 – 1 = one helluva mess.

So the first explanation for why the Obama presidency has produced such disappointing results is that Americans and especially members of the American political elite misapprehend the world and by extension the role allotted to the United States in that world. Obama himself is heir to those misapprehensions — which brings us to the second explanation for his lacklustre record in foreign policy, namely, his own naivety and inexperience.