Is Obama's foreign policy too European?

When he was first elected in 2008, Barack Obama was hailed on the old Continent as a president with almost European sensitivities and worldviews. But the compliment was unintentionally double-edged. For more than two decades now, Europeans have assumed that the world would remain comparatively stable and wouldn’t need much hard power to be maintained (at least European hard power, that is). So too, it seems, does Mr. Obama.

While Mr. Obama’s new style of diplomacy — soft power and nonintervention — was at first seen as a welcome break with the Bush years, five years later a dismal realization has set in. It turns out that soft power cannot replace hard power. On the contrary, soft power is merely a complementary foreign policy tool that can yield results only when it is backed up by real might and the political will to employ it if necessary.

Ultimately, the measuring stick for a successful foreign policy is not how many nice and convincing speeches a leader makes, but whether he succeeds in getting things to go his way. And in this respect Mr. Obama’s low-impact foreign policy was simply not enough. Because if America stays out of the fray, there are many others who will fill the void: Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia; the list of actors and countries that are actively pushing against European and American interests, and getting away with it, grows ever longer.