In the beginning came “engagement.” In his first State of the Union speech in February 2009, Obama told us that “in words and deeds, we are showing the world that a new era of engagement has begun.” A few days later he delivered a speech about the Iraq war and said again that “we are launching a new era of engagement with the world.” There would now be “comprehensive American engagement across the region.” In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly, in September 2009, he repeated the phrase: “We must embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect….We have sought, in word and deed, a new era of engagement with the world.”

What did the word engagement mean in this context? The message here was that people around the world hated us for our heavy-handedness and our militarism, which were the product not only of George W. Bush’s policies but long-standing patterns dating back to the beginning of the Cold War. This would now change. Our new president, the first to recognize fully the regressive quality of activist American foreign policy, would in the service of this goal be willing to meet even with Iranian leaders, indeed almost any hostile dictator. The days when we snubbed and demonized other nations were over. With Russia and other nations there would now be a “reset”—the term that, along with “engagement” and “global citizenship,” came to represent Obama’s foreign policy in his first year in office.