but humble, and both he and his advisors chided Clinton and Gore for their misguided efforts at nation-building. In short, Americans were told that Bush would focus on great power politics, avoid messy quagmires in countries of marginal strategic importance, and keep our powder dry.Bushs good intentions were blown off course completely by two distinct factors. First, instead of relying on realists from the Brent Scowcroft/Colin Powell wing of the Republican Party, he allowed Dick Cheney to populate his administration with neoconservatives who had greater ambitions and even worse judgment than the Clintonites. Second, the 9/11 attacks allowed the neocons to convert Bush to their misguided worldview and pave the way to the disastrous quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of giving Americans the foreign policy they had voted for, Bush, Cheney, and the neocons gave them the absurd goal of trying to transform the Middle East and then spread liberty throughout the world. We all know how well that worked.Fast forward to 2008. A little-known senator from Illinois runs a successful upstart campaign, based in part on his undeniable eloquence but also on the singular fact that he had opposed the Iraq war from the start. He vows to end that war and, more importantly, to rebuild Americas troubled relations with the rest of the world by embracing a more sensible, farsighted, and realistic foreign policy. Given what had happened in Iraq and also Afghanistan, surely he would heed the wishes of the American people (and the lessons of these latest experiments in nation-building) and not repeat his predecessors errors. And surely this former lecturer in constitutional law would correct the excesses of the Bush/Cheney era: closing Gitmo, ending torture, halting warrantless surveillance, reducing secrecy, and running a transparent and accountable government.But that didnt happen, either. Obama gave some great speeches, and his eloquence and evident idealism did win over publics in a number of places (and especially the Norwegian Nobel Committee). To his credit, he also led partly successful efforts to address climate change, nuclear security, and Irans nuclear program. But he increased U.S. reliance on targeted killings, prosecuted more whistleblowers than Bush did, and refused to hold top official national security officials accountable when they deceived the public. He approved an ill-conceived surge in Afghanistan to no good purpose, waffled in his response to the Arab Spring, backed a foolish intervention in Libya that created a failed state, and has been unable to fully disengage from the tar baby in Iraq. His efforts to advance an Israeli-Palestinian peace came to naught for the same reason that the previous 20 years of U.S. peace processing had failed: AIPAC and the rest of the Israeli lobby made it impossible for Washington to be a genuine, honest broker or to halt the endless expansion of Israeli settlements.To be sure, Obama kept the United States out of Syria and has taken a measured approach toward the crisis in Ukraine. This good judgment has led hawks to criticize him for weakness and to claim that excessive U.S. restraint is creating a more dangerous world.