OP-ED: Tell the U.S.: "No We Can't" (The AUSTRALIAN)

We all hope Barack Obama can rebuild the US's place in the world. But will that hope be fulfilled? To answer that, we need to do more than admire the new President. We must go back and look at what's gone wrong during the past eight years, because then can we say whether Obama has what it takes to overcome them.

For me, alas, the answer is no. The challenges to America's global position are not those of mere mismanagement. They arise from a profound mismatch between America's global objectives on the one hand and its power on the other, now and increasingly in the future.

To reconcile that mismatch, Obama needs to define new, more modest and more realistic and achievable objectives for his foreign policy.

This is not the way most Americans, including the new President, see the problem. Instead they blame the previous president. That's understandable enough. George W. Bush used American power so badly it seems natural to blame the setbacks of the past eight years on his errors. But America's problems are much bigger than Bush. His administration was arrogant, cynical, negligent, brutal and incompetent. But even if it had been wise and skilful, the aims Bush set for US policy were simply beyond the scope of US power to deliver, no matter how prudently and persuasively it was applied.

Consider Bush's key objectives: he committed the US to transforming Iraq, to rebuilding Afghanistan, to containing Russia, to disarming North Korea and Iran, and to sustaining US primacy in Asia in the face of China's rise.

He has failed in all of them, but would anyone else have done better? Bush's incompetence created America's problems in Iraq, but none of these other challenges are his fault. And no one - certainly not the new President - has any persuasive ideas about what new things the US can do to fix them that differ much from Bush's plans, or have any better prospects for success.

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