One of his most towering achievements: He’s actually made one of the worst places on earth worse:

It would be the height of unfairness to blame the Obama administration outright for everything that’s happened in the Middle East in the past five years. The region’s bad actors and cultural disorders are often well beyond the reach of the United States, regardless of who’s in office. But limitations are one thing—ineptitude another. It’s simply hard to find a single instance of President Obama responding to recent regional events in a way that has paid off either for the United States or its allies. At the same time, America’s antagonists — chiefly Iran and its enablers — have been emboldened and are now ascendant.

It’s a pretty comprehensive foreign-policy disaster.

[Update a few minutes later]

“No one defends Obama on foreign policy these days.”

Well, to be fair, Carney still does. But he gets paid to.

It’s pretty hard to, though I expect I have some commenters who will continue to pathetically attempt it.

[Update later morning]

Obama’s Punch and Judy foreign policy:

Obama, in other words, knows precisely what he doesn’t want to do. No errors. No big, embarrassing strikeouts. Singles and doubles. In baseball, that’s called a Punch and Judy, station-to-station offense. Move the runners along gradually; keep momentum going.

But if your global rivals know you best by your self-imposed limits, how capably can you project power? Is it canny to concede more than necessary? This is the central question for Obama’s foreign policy. He argued forcefully here that the greater danger is picking reckless fights or pretending a war-exhausted American public will support war in Syria, Ukraine, or anywhere in Asia.

The problem for Obama is the perception here and elsewhere that the most forceful thing he’s done on this trip or since Benghazi has been to explain what he can’t do — not what he can.

The number of things he can’t do is boundless.