Obama also reacted slowly and with obvious reluctance to the June 2009 uprising in Iran, to the Tahrir Square demonstrations against Mubarak, and to the unbelievably courageous Syrians taking to the streets against Assad — and there being shot by the thousands. For these people did not fit the idea the president had of the region; they were supposed to be angry about Israel, not about dignity, justice, corruption and oppression. The Obama view was simply at odds with reality. At this juncture in Obama's third year, reality may be said slowly to be imposing itself, case by case, on American policy, but there has by all accounts been no real reassessment by the president of what went wrong with his understanding of the world. This adjustment of deed without any change in theory or explanation results in intellectual incoherence. Obama and his team view themselves as remoralising American foreign policy after the terrible Bush years when all we did was torture and attack day after day, ignoring international law with Cheneyite glee. Yet while the Bush approach to terrorists was to capture them, treat them as prisoners of war, and squeeze them for information, the Obama approach is the converse: treat those you have as mere criminals, but seek to avoid getting any more inconvenient detainees — by killing instead of capturing. Thus the great increase in drone strikes. The many difficult issues that arise from holding prisoners are avoided when they are dead — and this approach is presented as the more liberal and moral alternative to Bush's camp at Guantánamo.

Similarly, none of the insults hurled at Bush for violating not only international but domestic law has been withdrawn, yet the Obama administration simply ignored the War Powers Act with respect to Libya. Unwilling to ask Congress for permission or to argue as Bush had that the law was unconstitutional, Obama's lawyers were left to suggest that the law applies only to "hostilities" and that there were none in Libya. This argument drew the many laughs it deserved, but reveals an administration that can occasionally see what it must do yet cannot defend those actions within the terms of its own belief system.

Now, the campaign promise to close Guantánamo "in one year" has been broken, and the plan to try prisoners in American courts with the full panoply of rights has been abandoned. Many other policy initiatives have been defeated or dropped, at least for now, whether through congressional or public refusal or because they simply did not work. As the administration shifts into campaign mode, the sharper edges of its policies are likely to be even further blunted in any event. There will be no more great foreign policy initiatives now, as Obama seeks to avoid electoral dangers. A new president in 2012 will probably face a world much like the one he would see if he won the election tomorrow. What must he do in his first hundred days to change American foreign policy? Here are three things.