Watch: Obama hits a 'rough patch' on foreign front

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Israel has humiliated the Vice President of the United States. China, to whom we owe hundreds of billions of dollars, is angry with us. Russia doesn't trust us. Afghanistan is a mess. The jury is out on Iraq. We're all but certain Iran will have nuclear weapons. U.S. citizens are being brutally murdered in Mexico.

So far Indonesia, Guam and Australia, whose plans for President Obama's visit went askew when he put everything on hold to lobby for health insurance reform, are still allies. Canada, our biggest source of foreign oil, is still friendly, but you never know.

The president who was going to restore America's luster abroad has hit a rough patch. Former President Clinton is far more popular with foreigners than Obama.

We should be grateful that Obama hasn't given up and gone back to Chicago on grounds this job just isn't much fun anymore. And, he probably is wondering, who was the whiz kid who got him on Fox News, where he was berated for special deals to get votes on health care. News accounts called the usually unflappable "no drama" Obama "testy" during the Fox interview.

Things got so bad on the foreign front, after Israel said during Vice President Biden's visit that it was going ahead with settlements the United States absolutely opposes, that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to spring into action. Israel's breach of etiquette, protocol and common sense, was a setback for the U.S.-Israel relationship, she said. And she even sounded angry. None of that diplomatic sweet talk.

Next, CIA Director Leon Panetta began boasting that al-Qaeda has been driven deeper into hiding and that Osama bin Laden's leadership is crumbling. A lot of us had forgotten we have a CIA. Meanwhile Cabinet officers are squabbling over what we would do with bin Laden if we ever capture him, an unlikely event, according to many in government. Here's betting he is never brought to U.S. soil, never held in a U.S. prison and never stands trial of any sort.

U.S. foreign policy seems to be foundering, partly because there are tensions on so many fronts. Hillary Clinton is certainly hard working enough. But she seems to be skimming the surface of problems in so many arenas that it's hard to tell if, let alone where, substantive progress is being made.

We want three major things from foreign policy:

We want to be safe from our enemies. We want our intelligence services to know what is going that might be harmful to us at any given time at any given place.

We want our country to be respected not only because our military is powerful but because we are honorable people who do not want to do others gratuitous harm and because we act ethically and fairly, with human rights for all as our goal.

We want to be the honest broker keeping the strong from taking unfair advantage of the weak.

And we're struggling on all three fronts. That's one reason why the scurrilous people whose greed and mismanagement caused the financial collapse truly were evil. Aside from causing so much pain to so many individuals, they diverted attention from our national goals. They weakened our country as a whole and as a force for good abroad.

We as a people are into instant gratification, solving problems and moving on. We want others to like us but aren't going to spend much effort or time on them if they don't.
The problem with foreign policy is that it involves moving mountains, one inch at a time. And sometimes there are major setbacks.

After the health care contretemps is sorted out, or at least after we are all too exhausted by it to muster much energy over it, Obama should give a major foreign policy address explaining what his goals are, what progress, if any, he is making, and what the chances of success are.

No politics -- just a straightforward analysis of our place in the world in 2010.

(Scripps Howard columnist Ann McFeatters has covered the White House and national politics since 1986. Contact amcfeatters(at)nationalpress.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)

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