Foreign Policy: Obama is learning the price a president pays when lofty rhetoric meets hard reality.

The second year of President Obama's foreign-policy and national-security management continued the pattern of decline established in his first year

editorializes Washington Times as it turns out that the Obama administration is ramping up its secret war on terror and as the paper notes that the "total deaths in Afghanistan in 2010 are greater than the sum of the deaths suffered in the first seven years of the war, a period the president reflexively derides as a failure.".

The unbridled and naive optimism that ill-served the country in Mr. Obama's failed freshman outing gave way to a sense of policy drift in 2010. Even the president began to question whether the United States should maintain its primary global leadership role.

My only problem with this editorial is the language in the previous sentence, "Even the president began to question…" The whole point about a self-proclaimed (and proud) alarmist of Obama's bent is that his raison d'être is believing in the sins and in the guilt of America and/or the West, forming his entire outlook and making him tick in the first place, so that he can take on their illegitimate and unjust dominance over the rest of the world… Thus a leftist would not only "question whether the United States should maintain its primary global leadership role", he would outright oppose that role. Hence Obama's own role — as Apologizer-in-Chief…

…Now the White House is on the verge of declaring defeat and issuing an executive order affirming the unlimited detention of terror suspects. Mr. Obama is learning the price a president pays when lofty rhetoric meets hard reality.

Mr. Obama's unprecedented outreach to the global Muslim community has gone bust. Despite continued obsequious gestures in their direction, [the] effort has had no impact in reducing the threat of international terrorism and has engendered a sense of American weakness in the region.

…The Middle East peace process is no farther along than it had been a year ago. … Mr. Obama's 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, which was characterized as "a down payment" for future achievement, remains frozen in escrow.

The war in Afghanistan continued with mixed results. … The total deaths in Afghanistan in 2010 are greater than the sum of the deaths suffered in the first seven years of the war, a period the president reflexively derides as a failure.

…The year saw no solid progress in dealing with the threats posed by the North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons programs.

…The politically wounded president enjoyed two last-minute victories when the lame-duck Congress flew to his rescue by ratifying the New START nuclear-arms treaty and repealing the ban on homosexuals serving openly in the military. These were only victories for Mr. Obama on the domestic political scene. The START agreement will weaken the U.S. nuclear deterrent and hamper future missile-defense deployments. Having openly homosexual troops will be devastating to morale in the armed forces, and in practice the new policy's implementation will lead to the establishment of a privileged homosexual protected class with ramifications that will reach beyond military service.

Indeed, George Neumayr opines that Political correctness in Obama's military will assume a paradoxical character, becoming at once permissive and puritanical.

…Other notable events include the administration's failure to rally the international community to impose global energy restrictions to counter purported global warming - a White House letdown that was a victory for everyone but climate alarmists - and continuing to expand the use of drone strikes against terrorists, a sensible policy that is generating low level murmurs of "war crimes" among Mr. Obama's disappointed former supporters in the peace movement.

During his trip to India in November, Mr. Obama acknowledged and accepted America's decline. "For most of my lifetime," he said, "the U.S. was such an enormously dominant economic power ... that we always met the rest of the world economically on our terms." Now those days are over, which the president considers a good thing. Our nation also faces increased political competition from assertive rogue states, a resurgent Russia, looming China acquiring more U.S. debt and a variety of challenges the Obama national-security team has shown no ability to confront effectively. Mr. Obama would have us believe that American decline on his watch is inevitable, but he is as much its cause as its casualty.