Obama's Dilemma: U.S. Foreign Policy and Electoral Realities

STRATFOR ...."The vilification from all sides that follows any mention we make of American politics is both inevitable and unpleasant. Nevertheless, it’s our job to chronicle the unfolding of the international system, and the fact that the United States is moving deeply into an election cycle will affect American international behavior and therefore the international system."
....
"The U.S. president will not be deeply engaged in the world for more than a year. Thus, he will have to cope with events pressed on him. He may undertake initiatives, such as trying to revive the Middle East peace process, but such moves would have large political components that would make it difficult to cope with realities on the ground. The rest of the world knows this, of course. The question is whether and how they take advantage of it."
Obama's Dilemma: U.S. Foreign Policy and Electoral Realities is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

One has to ask, with near-daily trips to the hinterlands for campaigning and blame-shifting plus rounds of golf, when does Obama have time or even interest to spend with foreign policy advisors?
I see no trace of either in the man.

Obama’s Middle East Is in Tatters, Utter Tatters  "It is not actually his region. Still, with the arrogance that is so characteristic of his behavior in matters he knows little about (which is a lot of matters), he entered the region as if in a triumphal march. But it wasn’t the power and sway of America that he was representing in Turkey and in Egypt. For the fact is that he has not much respect for these representations of the United States."  Emphasis added.

Why Won’t Obama List Israelis Among the Victims of Terrorism?  "If not blowing up a bus in the Negev, then a shoot-out at the El Al counter at Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome. A family massacre in the Galilee, a mass murder of Olympic athletes in Munich, two high-toll bombings in Buenos Aires. In a Jerusalem Yeshiva, on a Tel Aviv thoroughfare. And the liquidation of five members of a family, yes, a family that lived in a settlement. But its three-month-old didn’t really know that. Knife across the neck anyway.
"The omission is surely deliberate."

Daniel Pipes: Obama's Pretend Counterterrorism Policy  "In brief, an organization connected to terrorists swoons over the administration's pretend counterterrorism policy while the grieving father of a terrorist scornfully dismisses it. That tells us everything.
"What now, with the enshrining of a fringe study as national policy? There are no shortcuts: Those who want a genuine counterterrorism policy must work to remove the Left and the multiculturalists from government."

Peter King (left) and Bennie Thompson (right) symbolize
 the difference in counterterrorism policy outlook.