United States Global Leadership (Updated)

Victor Davis Hanson; Obama’s Ironic Foreign Policy 

... "The election of 2008 changed all that. Barack Obama certainly did not see any special relationship with either Britain or Israel in the fashion of past presidents. He grandly announced that, given his Hawaiian roots, he would be our first Pacific president, and promised a pivot of American attention toward Asia. (That pivot impressed the Chinese as much as the vaunted French army of the 1930s deterred Hitler.)

"Nor was Obama just talk. He almost immediately declared a total exit from Iraq and withdrawal dates from Afghanistan. In Libya, “leading from behind” outsourced leadership to Britain and France. Benghazi was our thanks for bombing Gadhafi out of power."

GlobalSecurity.org   "Global leadership is urgently needed. The United Nations is incapable of providing this, particularly since decisions in its core leadership, the Security Council, often pit the United States against Russia, China, or both. The only nation capable of providing the needed global leadership is the United States, but it is withdrawing from this role, becoming more of an ordinary state, no longer a state forcefully promoting freedom and democracy. At the same time that it needs it badly, the world is rejecting US leadership for several major, and even contradictory, reasons."
....
The author's opinion on the upshot of our present status is this:
"Most of all, the United States must assume a clear and principled global leadership position. No other nation is in a position to do this. Without leadership in a globalized world facing a daunting range of economic, environmental and political challenges, there can only be turmoil, continuing confrontations, and a steady decline in US prosperity."