What Obama could learn from Bush

The period since September 11, 2001, will never be described by any historian as a golden age of U.S. foreign policy. I know. I have just written a history on it, and it's not pretty.
Since 9/11, the United States has swung unsettlingly from one set of flawed policies to another. First, the unilateralist excess of the first term of the Bush administration; its signature error was the invasion of Iraq. Then, the reactive swing of Barack Obama, toward disengagement and dithering. In a tragic irony, a war in...