Obama Needs to Reset his International Strategy

For a president with impressive foreign policy successes in his first term, Barack Obama has had a difficult year and a half on the global stage since his reelection. The White House faces growing international criticism that it is not leading assertively on daunting crises, from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine to humanitarian disaster in Syria to China’s increasingly troublesome pressure on American friends in the East China and South China seas. Some of this criticism is unfair, but the Obama team can’t afford to ignore it.