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I also finally caught up with this Niall Ferguson column from Newsweek I’ve been seeing referenced hither and thither, harshly attacking Obama’s handling of the Egypt situation: The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak’s cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever ultimately wins, Obama loses. And the alienation doesn’t end there. America’s two closest friends in the region—Israel and Saudi Arabia—are both disgusted. The Saudis, who dread all manifestations of revolution, are appalled at Washington’s failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak. The Israelis, meanwhile, are dismayed by the administration’s apparent cluelessness. Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo’s Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy. This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration’s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried. The president himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth and upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy issues. This is kind of over the top, no? First of all, the Herzliya conference isn’t a Peace Corps meeting; it’s a pretty strongly neoconnish and right-leaning gathering, to varying degrees of seriousness; the closing night speaker this year, reports Matt Duss in The Nation, who attended, was none other than Haley Barbour. So of course the prevailing opinion there was bound to be that Obama had handled it disastrously. Then he launches into this whole comparison of Obama to Bismarck, noting that Bismarck immediately declared himself on the right side of history, no waffling about. All right. I haven’t read my German unification history for a good 25 years, I admit, so I’m sure there’s a lot I’m forgetting, but there is the fundamental fact that Bismarck was supporting the forces for German nationalism that were right there in central Europe and united by a culture and a language, whereas…what? Obama is supposed to be able to do the same with a country a third of the way around the world? It just seems silly. I’ve written thousands of columns over the years. I know how it goes. Sometimes you get a bee in your bonnet and you let it rip. Every once in a great while you hit what we Americans call a tape-measure shot (please explain, someone). But time generally instructs that you should let those columns sit for a day and read them over once you’ve calmed down. Oh yes, and then there’s the part where Obama and Hillary ought to be acting more like Kissinger. Would that be the Cambodia Kissinger? Chile? East Timor? Or the one who lengthened the Vietnam war in Paris? Ferguson wants “grand strategy,” you see. Hey, he’s Niall Ferguson. I’m just me. But what if we live in a post-grand strategy age? Grand strategies (by which he means realpolitik, mainly) ensured stability, chiefly. Stability is good. But so are other things, and we are now in an age, quite unlike the 1970s, when the peoples of the developing world want more: freedom, opportunity, economic self-determination. The world can’t be contained in the old Kennan sense these days, and should not be. I stand by what I said last week, and what both the Economist and Clive Crook say. Obama handled Egypt fine. The outcome, so far, is a positive one. The US didn’t mess that up. Ferguson voices the frustrations of the Cairo protesters, the Israelis and the Saudis. But it’s impossible that any US position could have satisfied all those players. You do the best you can. In the end, the protesters won, and the US didn’t hinder it. Obama administration US foreign policy Egypt Michael Tomasky guardian.co.uk