Just days after the election, the potential makings of a turning point materialised with the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus, apparently forced by an extramarital affair; and the controversy over Ambassador Susan Rice's public commentary about Benghazi, which imperilled her potential nomination to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. With a sex scandal and a potentially bruising Senate confirmation fight in prospect, the mainstream US media finally came alive, as usual focusing on the sensational rather than the significant. 

Whether or not Benghazi has dramatic historical importance, and reflects the point at which a true American global decline became evident, there is no doubt the tragedy embodies all the continuing defects of Obama's worldview and his blindness toward significant international realities. For purposes of assessing the course of a second Obama term, Benghazi may well hold the keys, both as to the policies and personnel of the coming four years.

On the blindness issue, Russia and China remain potential great power threats to America and the West, but these large historical challenges receive almost no attention from Obama himself. Unfortunately, the policy vacuum at the centre of Obama's relations with these states can be easily and quickly described: he simply ignores or misunderstands them, or both. No better example exists than the notorious March 2012 "open microphone" conversation with Russia's President Medvedev, where Obama asked for "space" for his own political safety before the November election, seemingly clueless about the actual signal he was sending. Similarly, Obama's massive budget cuts (nearly a trillion dollars) to US defence capabilities in his first term, coupled with his utter indifference to decreases of another half-trillion inherent in the December 31 "fiscal cliff", all reflect his comfort with American decline; he believes he can ignore external affairs at no risk. 

On the Middle East, however, with its combustible mixture of religion and politics, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, Obama does have both genuine interest and clear ideological biases, which are uniformly wrong. His only successes, such as the killing of Osama bin Laden (after ten years of effort commencing in 2001) and the unexpected continuation of many Bush Administration operational approaches to terrorism (such as retaining the Guantánamo Bay detention facility), have been due largely to the brute force of reality rather than Obama's personal inclinations.