It's interesting to contrast the administration's "wise" diplomacy abroad with its willingness to go nuclear at home

The administration that disbelieved intelligence under George W. Bush now believes every word it's told

writes Investor's Business Daily, while Mark Steyn points out that

It's interesting to contrast the administration's "wise" diplomacy abroad with its willingness to go nuclear at home. If you go to a "town hall" meeting and express misgivings about the effectiveness of the stimulus, you're a "racist" "angry" "Nazi" "evilmonger" "right-wing domestic terrorist."

It's perhaps no surprise that that doesn't leave a lot left over in the rhetorical arsenal for Putin, Chavez and Ahmadinejad.

…In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign-policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way.

A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as "harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend."