His response, of course, is to take credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi, and rescuing Western hostages from Somali pirates. To be sure, these are notable accomplishments, deserving due respect, but they hardly represent a coherent Obama policy. As with Guantánamo Bay's still flourishing terrorist prisoner camp, renditions, and assassinations even of US-citizen terrorists (such as Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen), blunt reality has forced remarkably out-of-character accommodations on the Obama Administration. Simply acknowledging the real world, however, does not constitute an adequate national security strategy, however politically helpful it may be for domestic American politics.

As with any politician, however, the reverse is also true: Obama can take credit for the successes on his watch, but he must also accept blame for the failures. And enormous failures there have been.  Prematurely declaring victory over al-Qaeda in particular and global terrorism in general will unquestionably haunt Obama, perhaps in November, and certainly in a second term. Iraq is verging on renewed sectarian strife, al-Qaeda terrorism and perhaps even dissolution because of Obama's ideological decision to withdraw all American combat forces by the end of last year. Similarly, in Afghanistan, Obama's insistence on ending combat operations in 2013 and removing US troops in 2014 has already had visibly negative consequences, both political and military. In February, for example, riots and killings across Afghanistan, purportedly caused by the burning of Korans, alone demonstrate how tenuous our position is. That the holy books had already been desecrated by captured terrorists using them to write messages to one another in Bagram prison, and that the US soldiers attempting to destroy the books did so mistakenly and not with malicious intent, was not sufficiently rational to prevent the outbursts.  

Moreover, there are larger failures with longer-range global consequences. Nuclear proliferation, exemplified by Iran and North Korea, is, by any metric, broadening and deepening, not diminishing. Other would-be great powers are stirring while America cuts back on its own capabilities. As long as global markets sustain high oil prices, for example, Russia will be modernising and expanding its conventional, nuclear and ballistic missile forces, and aggressively pursuing its political agenda in the former Soviet Union and Europe. Similarly, China's GNP growth allows the People's Liberation Army, itself a major economic actor, to increase and upgrade its conventional forces, enlarge and improve its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, and for the first time in centuries amass significant bluewater naval assets, both on and under the surface. 

These developments and others should have ignited a sweeping national debate on US foreign and defence policies, particularly during a presidential election campaign. But that has not happened.  While all the major Republican candidates (with the notable exception of Ron Paul) advocate a strong America, national security policy has been relegated to an essentially insignificant role. Nowhere was this better exemplified than in an early CNN debate among the Republican contenders, where the first national security question in a two-hour debate came only in the last 30 minutes, and only after the candidates had been asked their pizza preferences.

To be sure, Mitt Romney and others have proposed ambitious programmes to counteract the debilitating Obama agenda (full disclosure, I support Romney), stressing, for example, a re-emphasis on US national missile defence, and rebuilding the US Navy, which now has fewer ships at sea than at any point since 1916.