BUSH LITE:

In his first years as president, Obama brusquely rejected the emphasis on human rights that was, in varying proportions, the part of the foreign policy of every president from Jimmy Carter to the second Bush. After all, if it was Bush's policy, it was bad.

So he coldly ignored the Green movement against Iran's mullahs in June 2009, and he only hesitantly has expressed sympathy with what we at least used to call the Arab Spring.

But the mullahs have shown no more fellow feeling for the first black president than for the third Texas president or his four predecessors.

Our lack of engagement with the Arab Spring movement has reduced our leverage in the region. So has our sudden and abrupt withdrawal from Iraq, against military (but perhaps in accord with political) advice.

Where Obama has done better is in regions where he has followed the trajectory of Bush's (and in some cases Bill Clinton's) policies.

In Africa, he has continued Bush's widely successful campaign to eradicate AIDS. But there are signs that in some African countries Bush is more popular than the president whose father was a citizen of Kenya.

In Asia, once you get east of the horrifying conundrum of Pakistan, Obama has built alliances, formal and informal, with the major countries ringing China. Foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead hails the recent and first trilateral talks between the U.S., Japan and India as "history made."

Obama has built on our rapprochement with India, started gingerly by Clinton and continued with gusto by Bush. Suddenly China finds itself surrounded by nations, including South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and, maybe, Burma, resisting its expansionist thrusts. Japan is buying F-35s, and Australia has agreed to host U.S. troops.

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