Transitions....

"How did it happen?
"Begin with hubris: the new president told the world, in his Cairo speech in June, 2009, that he had special expertise in understanding the entire world of Islam -- knowledge 'rooted in my own experience' because 'I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed'. But Obama wasn't speaking that day in an imaginary location called 'the world of Islam'; he was in Cairo, in the Arab Middle East, in a place where nothing counted more than power."
Elliott Abrams, Reagan-Bush diplomat; quote from The Man Who Broke the Middle East op-ed

The White House Blog : President Obama addressing West Point graduates, May 28, 2014

Since then, the American president has let loose his diplomatic dilettantes on the world stage, mimicking the American voice of reason, forgetting the world is not a reasonable place. Witness the Congo, Nigeria, North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan to name a few and not necessarily in that order of precedence as hot-spots, let alone Islamist dysfunction.

There is an implosion within the Middle East; eastern Europe is in a state of turmoil, the Taliban are prepared to return in strength to Afghanistan, Pakistan is in danger as a nuclear power of loosing its control to Islamists, North Korea is set to explode newer more powerful nuclear bombs and with Iran is experimenting with longer-range, more accurate missiles; Syria and Iraq are dissolving into sectarian mutually-loathing atrocities.

"Ultimately, global leadership requires us to see the world as it is, with all its danger and uncertainty. But American leadership also requires us to see the world as it should be – a place where the aspirations of individual human beings matter; where hopes and not just fears govern; where the truths written into our founding documents can steer the currents of history in the direction of justice. And we cannot do that without you."
" In fact, by most measures, America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world.  Those who argue otherwise -- who suggest that America is in decline, or has seen its global leadership slip away -- are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics.  Think about it.  Our military has no peer.  The odds of a direct threat against us by any nation are low and do not come close to the dangers we faced during the Cold War."
Meanwhile, our economy remains the most dynamic on Earth; our businesses the most innovative.  Each year, we grow more energy independent.  From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations.  America continues to attract striving immigrants.  The values of our founding inspire leaders in parliaments and new movements in public squares around the globe.  And when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help.  (Applause.)  So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.  That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come."
"But to say that we have an interest in pursuing peace and freedom beyond our borders is not to say that every problem has a military solution.  Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences -- without building international support and legitimacy for our action; without leveling with the American people about the sacrifices required.  Tough talk often draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans.  As General Eisenhower, someone with hard-earned knowledge on this subject, said at this ceremony in 1947: "War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men."
U.S. President Barack Obama, West Point graduation address

Now, the man who so early in his mandate as the biracial president of the United States of America was gold-plated a Noble Laureate, finds himself stumped on his way to global peace by the reality that the globe has erupted in conflict. The question that now besets and bedevils him is whither lofty isolation - as opposed to bloody engagement...? His line in the sand is one weeping with human blood, a reproach for witnessing and not responding.

Of course, how to respond? One of the most religious countries on Earth is also a nation of secularist governance as opposed to all those places around the globe where religion motivates government action. The great secular/sacred divide is one Barack Obama thought he understood well from his perspective of witness as a child, a youth, a young man, and finally a president of the most powerful nation on Earth, which now presents as somewhat less powerful than formerly.

For America's former and now hugely puzzled national cohorts in Western-style democracy, Mr. Obama's laid back style of power is not one they recognize, though it is one that Mr. Obama promised obliquely when he campaigned for the office he now holds. For America's former and remaining clients in the Middle East and North Africa the new chimera that has evolved with this presidency has been greeted not with acclaim but with contempt.

For the man who was pleased to accept the world's premier peace prize, the walk from the podium into the future turned out to be no walk in the park but an unaware stroll into a ravening-beast infested jungle of man-eaters he is desperately attempting to out-run and cannot. In the vacuum that his escaping back has created, others eager and willing to assume the mantle of prime controller of world destiny have stepped confidently forward.

While the world decried the sometimes-bullying effect of America-the-Arbiter-and-Controller-in-Chief, it heavily relied on the power backed up by intent and determination and fearless intervention. Now the world shrinks back in apprehension at America's emerging new replacements which is dangerously what Imperialistic Russia and the triumphalist Islamic Republic of Iran are beginning to resemble.