Has Obama changed anything?

Weak. Apologist. Those two words are repeated endlessly in the Republican party's attack on Barack Obama, as it tries to persuade voters that the US president is not worthy of another term as commander-in-chief.

The charge of weakness will be difficult to make stick. As the president's team will endlessly remind Americans, he is the man who sent in a combat team to kill Osama Bin Laden — against the advice of some of his aides — and who has ruthlessly pounded Al Qaida camps in Pakistan with drone strikes.

The irony is that there are really serious criticisms that can be made of Obama's handling of foreign affairs. But the real problem is not that he is weak or apologises for the US. It is that he has over-promised and under-delivered. Fortunately for the president, this is a relatively complicated idea that relies on some knowledge of world affairs. Therefore it is not a critique that the Republicans are likely to attempt.

Nonetheless, it is sobering to measure Obama against the goals he set himself. His international priorities in 2008 were clear and ambitious. He intended to solve the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomacy. He wanted to make peace between Israel and Palestine. He would transform America's image in the Muslim world. The Guantanamo Bay prison camp would close and suspected terrorists would be tried in US courts.

The new president would get the US out of Iraq and use the freed-up resources to fix Afghanistan. And he would dramatically improve relations with Russia and China.

Iran issue

Go down this checklist and you will notice far more failures than successes. The rapprochement with Iran never happened. Instead, as Obama nears the end of his first term, the US and Iran are dangerously close to armed conflict. His efforts to revive the Middle East peace process have got nowhere. Guantanamo has not closed and the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad is taking place there.

After some agonising, the president ordered a George W. Bush-like troop "surge" into Afghanistan. This policy also looks likely to end in failure. The use of drone strikes has increased dramatically in Pakistan and leaves behind a dangerous legacy of a rotten relationship with a nuclear-armed nation of 180 million people.

After the early ecstatic reaction to Obama's Cairo speech of 2009, in which the president called for a "new beginning" between the US and Muslims, America's popularity has slumped again in the Islamic world.

Intent on according the Muslim world more respect, the president was also initially blindsided by the Iranian uprising of 2009 and the Arab Spring of 2011 — both of which were events that fitted more easily into a neoconservative narrative, about the universal yearning for democracy.

Arab Spring

Obama must surely regret his lukewarm support for the Iranian uprising. When it came to the Arab Spring, he struck a necessarily uneasy compromise between supporting US ideals and protecting US interests. The idealistic president called for Hosni Mubarak to go and supported the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi. The pragmatist has hung back over Syria. It is hard to argue that he has made any big mistakes. But the big picture is of declining American influence in the region.

Obama's policies towards Russia and China have also not worked out as planned. He came to power at a time when relations between the US and Russia were at a dangerous low, after the Russian war with Georgia. The Obama team proclaimed its desire to press the ‘reset' button — and for a while this policy paid dividends. But the ‘reset' was built around President Dmitry Medvedev. The return of Vladimir Putin has brought a fresh chill to relations.

The US and China have clashed over trade, climate change and human rights. And military tensions are rising in the Pacific.

The UN remains a tetchy and dysfunctional forum. The G20 — while it played an important role in stabilising the world economy in 2009 — is now something of a disappointment. There have been no big new deals on climate or trade.

If the newly elected president in 2008 had been told this would be his list of global achievements he would surely have been disappointed. Obama ran as the anti-Bush candidate. So it is ironic that his signature achievement overseas — the killing of Bin Laden — is one Bush would have been proud of.

— Financial Times