In a word, Barack Obama did not understand that the world’s challenges preceded George W. Bush and would outlive Barack Obama, much less that he was a steward charged with preserving the U.S.-inspired postwar stability. He failed to see that much of the anger with Bush had been over Iraq between 2004 and 2008. To the degree the U.S. was unpopular, this resulted largely from entrenched critics abroad amplifying American domestic opposition to the Iraq War and to the so-called war on terror. Yet by 2009, the Iraq War was largely over and won, and the war on terror had largely established protocols to prevent another 9/11-scale attack. In most other regards, Bush had simply carried on a bipartisan foreign policy not much different from that of Bill Clinton, Bush’s father, or Ronald Reagan.

Obama did not grasp that being against Bush meant for the most part opposing that bipartisan foreign policy of the previous 30 years — with regard to Venezuela and Cuba, to the Middle East, and to Russia, China, and India. Such knee-jerk opposition inevitably caused embarrassment when Obama was forced to quietly accept or even expand Bush’s war on terror, and to assure Asia and Europe that things were still as they had been before he took office. Sometime in late 2013 Barack Obama seemed to sense that his foreign policy had failed, and that in almost every area of the globe things were more dangerous than when he entered office — and scarier because of his own initiatives.

And what now? Blaming Bush had a shelf life of four years, proved nihilistic, and can’t be continued for the next three. No one abroad cares that Obama is either leftwing or the first African-American president or that he speaks well from a teleprompter. Hope and change have become a sort of embarrassment. Another Cairo speech would earn guffaws. More loud reaching out to Turkey, Cuba, and Venezuela would earn eye-rolling. China has heard it all before. Iran is calibrating how to time its nuclear acquisition with the ending of Obama’s second term. Israel is politely tuning out. Putin is wondering: Can all these gifts be for real, or might there still be some elaborate ruse?