Charles Krauthammer explains the problems with Obama's foreign policy:

The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.

That picture -- a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam -- is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.

They've watched President Obama's humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.

They've watched America acquiesce to Russia's re-exerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25 years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over Georgia (Russia's de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama "reset" policy).

They've watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran's agent in the Arab Levant -- sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds, and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the U.S. and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. "engagement."

They've observed the administration's gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see not just U.S. passivity as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez organizes his anti-American "Bolivarian" coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chavez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.

This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat -- accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/05/21/the_fruits_of_weakness_105676.html

How is this better than George W. Bush's "cowboy" foreign policy?

Obama is correct about one thing: the US cannot do everything alone. But his current policies destroy the alliances the US has and are an insult to the US' most reliable allies. And, America, you need those allies. You are not that powerful alone. Your power base is not your military alone but the cultural influence you have in the world, most notably through your allies.

Poland, the UK, South-Korea and Israel are allies that the US cannot afford to lose. (And in two of those cases I mean this quite literally. There is a chance that they will actually be lost.)

Of course losing the US as an ally has even worse consequences for those four countries, especially for South-Korea and Israel (and more so for South-Korea than for Israel). And while the UK can afford to be without an alliance with the US, the other three cannot.

We'll see how the elections in November go. But I'm afraid the Republican Party is being eaten up by the Paulians the the "Tea Party" and might not have many moderate candidates to run. Perhaps the right wing of the Democrats has a chance at their primaries. I can imagine that many Democrats are upset with Obama and his ilk.