Thank you, Mr. or Ms. Anonymous Obama Adviser Speaking on Background to Ryan Lizza. Thank you for so boldly and visibly injecting into our politics the phrase “leading from behind.” Thank you for associating it with your boss. Thanks for confirming that our current president believes his task is to accommodate American decline. Thanks for reminding us how high a priority he places on appeasing those who revile us. And thanks for explaining that our Leader from Behind sees his role as “shepherding us through this phase” of appeasement and decline. 
 
 Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the president’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength. “It’s so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world,” the adviser said. “But it’s necessary for shepherding us through this phase.” 
 
 After all, we, like sheep, had gone astray. Under the spell of John Wayne, Rambo, and Ronald Reagan, we’d come to believe in American exceptionalism, in a special American global role and responsibility. Or perhaps we’ve been astray from the very beginning, with all the talk from the Founding on about our distinctive task and national destiny. But now a new shepherd has come to guide us, stealthily and modestly (though, one must add, with a fair amount of personal self-promotion) away from foolish thoughts of national assertion and exertion. And toward a future of . . . what? 
 
 Whatever this future world will look like, it will not be pretty, nor will it be friendly to America. Lizza’s piece is titled “The Consequentialist.” The claim is that Barack Obama is a hard-headed pragmatist who judges policy choices by their real-world consequences. But who now wants to defend the consequences of Barack Obama’s foreign policy? 
 
 As Americans, we will have to hope and work for the best for the next year and a half. But, as Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, “from President Obama’s shocking passivity during Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution to his dithering on Libya, acting at the very last moment, then handing off to a bickering coalition, yielding the current bloody stalemate,” Obama’s has been “a foreign policy of hesitation, delay, and indecision, marked by plaintive appeals to the (fictional) ‘international community’ to do what only America can.” The consequences of leading from behind have been grave. Another four years could be disastrous. 
 
 Of course, the talk of leading from behind is mostly rationalization. When Barack Obama was only a teenager, Harvey Mansfield noted that, “From having been the aggressive doctrine of vigorous, spirited men, liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism.” Mansfield asked, “Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?” Not President Obama. His administration’s lack of strength and confidence in defense of liberty, its trembling before illiberalism, its failure to lead, is now dressed up and sent out into the world as “leading from behind.” 
 
 The world isn’t much fooled. Dictators aren’t fooled. The American people aren’t fooled. Even liberals are getting hard to fool. Lizza’s article gave the Obama adviser the last word. But did even the typical New Yorker reader nod in approbation as he put down his May 2 issue and picked up his glass of Chablis? 
 
 We doubt it. It’s getting pretty difficult to avoid noticing the grand mugging by reality that we are experiencing, both abroad and at home. And the notion that the Obama administration is effectively dealing with the muggers—from Qaddafi to the budget deficit—is becoming increasingly laughable. 
 
 How do you defeat a leader from behind? With a leader from the front. All the Republicans have to do is nominate a real leader: a workhorse not a show horse; a steady hand not a flip-flopper; a profile in courage not in cleverness; a competent man or woman with strength and confidence in defense of liberty at home and abroad. 
 
 Surely this isn’t too much to ask? ||||| Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the president’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” 
 
 — Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker, May 2 issue 
 
 To be precise, leading from behind is a style, not a doctrine. Doctrines involve ideas, but since there are no discernible ones that make sense of Obama foreign policy — Lizza’s painstaking two-year chronicle shows it to be as ad hoc, erratic and confused as it appears — this will have to do. 
 
 And it surely is an accurate description, from President Obama’s shocking passivity during Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution to his dithering on Libya, acting at the very last moment, then handing off to a bickering coalition, yielding the current bloody stalemate. It’s been a foreign policy of hesitation, delay and indecision, marked by plaintive appeals to the (fictional) “international community” to do what only America can. 
 
 But underlying that style, assures this Obama adviser, there really are ideas. Indeed, “two unspoken beliefs,” explains Lizza. “That the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.” 
 
 Amazing. This is why Obama is deliberately diminishing American presence, standing and leadership in the world? 
 
 Take proposition one: We must “lead from behind” because U.S. relative power is declining. Even if you accept the premise, it’s a complete non sequitur. What does China’s rising GDP have to do with American buck-passing on Libya, misjudging Iran, appeasing Syria? 
 
 True, China is rising. But first, it is the only power of any significance rising militarily relative to us. Russia is recovering from levels of military strength so low that it barely registers globally. And European power is in true decline (see Europe’s performance — excepting the British — in Afghanistan and its current misadventures in Libya). 
 
 And second, the challenge of a rising Chinese military is still exclusively regional. It would affect a war over Taiwan. It has zero effect on anything significantly beyond China’s coast. China has no blue-water navy. It has no foreign bases. It cannot project power globally. It might in the future — but by what logic should that paralyze us today? 
 
 Proposition two: We must lead from behind because we are reviled. Pray tell, when were we not? During Vietnam? Or earlier, under Eisenhower? When his vice president was sent on a goodwill trip to Latin America, he was spat upon and so threatened by the crowds that he had to cut short his trip. Or maybe later, under the blessed Reagan? The Reagan years were marked by vast demonstrations in the capitals of our closest allies denouncing America as a warmongering menace taking the world into nuclear winter. 
 
 “Obama came of age politically,” explains Lizza, “during the post-Cold War era, a time when America’s unmatched power created widespread resentment.” But the world did not begin with the coming to consciousness of Barack Obama. Cold War resentments ran just as deep. 
 
 It is the fate of any assertive superpower to be envied, denounced and blamed for everything under the sun. Nothing has changed. Moreover, for a country so deeply reviled, why during the massive unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan and Syria have anti-American demonstrations been such a rarity? 
 
 Who truly reviles America the hegemon? The world that Obama lived in and shaped him intellectually: the elite universities; his Hyde Park milieu (including his not-to-be-mentioned friends, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn); the church he attended for two decades, ringing with sermons more virulently anti-American than anything heard in today’s full-throated uprising of the Arab Street. 
 
 It is the liberal elites who revile the American colossus and devoutly wish to see it cut down to size. Leading from behind — diminishing America’s global standing and assertiveness — is a reaction to their view of America, not the world’s. 
 
 Other presidents have taken anti-Americanism as a given, rather than evidence of American malignancy, believing — as do most Americans — in the rightness of our cause and the nobility of our intentions. Obama thinks anti-Americanism is a verdict on America’s fitness for leadership. I would suggest that “leading from behind” is a verdict on Obama’s fitness for leadership. 
 
 Leading from behind is not leading. It is abdicating. It is also an oxymoron. Yet a sympathetic journalist, channeling an Obama adviser, elevates it to a doctrine. The president is no doubt flattered. The rest of us are merely stunned. 
 
 letters@charleskrauthammer.com ||||| WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney intensified his efforts Monday to draw a sharp contrast with President Obama on national security in the presidential campaign’s closing stages, portraying Mr. Obama as having mishandled the tumult in the Arab world and having left the nation exposed to a terrorist attack in Libya. 
 
 In a speech he gave at the Virginia Military Institute, Mr. Romney declared that “hope is not a strategy” for dealing with the rise of Islamist governments in the Middle East or an Iran racing toward the capability to build a nuclear weapon, according to excerpts released by his campaign. 
 
 The essence of Mr. Romney’s argument is that he would take the United States back to an earlier era, one that would result, as his young foreign policy director, Alex Wong, told reporters on Sunday, in “the restoration of a strategy that served us well for 70 years.” 
 
 But beyond his critique of Mr. Obama as failing to project American strength abroad, Mr. Romney has yet to fill in many of the details of how he would conduct policy toward the rest of the world, or to resolve deep ideological rifts within the Republican Party and his own foreign policy team. It is a disparate and politely fractious team of advisers that includes warring tribes of neoconservatives, traditional strong-defense conservatives and a band of self-described “realists” who believe there are limits to the degree the United States can impose its will. 
 
 Each group is vying to shape Mr. Romney’s views, usually through policy papers that many of the advisers wonder if he is reading. Indeed, in a campaign that has been so intensely focused on economic issues, some of these advisers, in interviews over the past two weeks in which most insisted on anonymity, say they have engaged with him so little on issues of national security that they are uncertain what camp he would fall into, and are uncertain themselves about how he would govern. 
 
 “Would he take the lead in bombing Iran if the mullahs were getting too close to a bomb, or just back up the Israelis?” one of his senior advisers asked last week. “Would he push for peace with the Palestinians, or just live with the status quo? He’s left himself a lot of wiggle room.” 
 
 In his remarks, Mr. Romney addressed the Palestinian issue, saying, “I will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel.” And he faulted Mr. Obama for failing to deliver on that front. 
 
 But while the theme Mr. Romney hit the hardest in his speech at V.M.I. — that the Obama era has been one marked by “weakness” and the abandonment of allies — has political appeal, the specific descriptions of what Mr. Romney would do, on issues like drawing red lines for Iran’s nuclear program and threatening to cut off military aid to difficult allies like Pakistan or Egypt if they veer away from American interests, sound at times quite close to Mr. Obama’s approach. 
 
 And the speech appeared to glide past positions Mr. Romney himself took more than a year ago, when he voiced opposition to expanding the intervention in Libya to hunt down Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with what he termed insufficient resources. He called it “mission creep and mission muddle,” though within months Mr. Qaddafi was gone. And last spring, Mr. Romney was caught on tape telling donors he believed there was “just no way” a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could work. 
 
 Mr. Romney’s Monday speech called vaguely for support of Libya’s “efforts to forge a lasting government” and to pursue the “terrorists who attacked our consulate in Benghazi and killed Americans.” And he said he would “recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security” with Israel. But he did not say what resources he would devote to those tasks. 
 
 The shifts, a half dozen of Mr. Romney’s advisers said in interviews, partly reflect the fact that the candidate himself has not deeply engaged in these issues for most of the campaign, certainly not with the enthusiasm, and instincts, he has on domestic economic issues. But they also represent continuing divisions. 
 
 Some are on the way to resolution. Over the summer, an “inner circle” of foreign policy advisers emerged, with Richard S. Williamson, a former Reagan administration official who briefly returned to government to serve President George W. Bush, playing a leading role. Another central player is Mitchell B. Reiss, the president of Washington College in Maryland and a veteran of Mr. Romney’s 2008 campaign. And Jim Talent, the former Missouri senator, has taken a major role in defense strategy. 
 
 Liz Cheney, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration and is the daughter of Mr. Bush’s vice president, has begun to join a weekly conference call that sporadically includes Dan Senor, who served as spokesman for the American occupation government in Iraq. Since the Republican National Convention, Mr. Senor has been assigned to the staff of Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, who in recent weeks has made Mr. Obama’s foreign policy a particular target.
– The "leading from behind" theme looks to be emerging as a conservative line of attack against President Obama. The phrase comes from an Obama adviser describing the Libya strategy in a New Yorker piece on foreign policy by Ryan Lizza. (Read it here.) The gist is that Obama is a pragmatist who recognizes that US power is declining and that a lot of people hate us. "Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength," writes Lizza. It's the anti-John-Wayne approach, adds the Obama adviser quoted earlier. Yesterday, Charles Krauthammer weighed in at the Washington Post, criticizing the piece for turning a "foreign policy of hesitation" into a doctrine. "Leading from behind is not leading," Krauthammer writes. "It is abdicating." Now William Kristol at the Weekly Standard is on the case, sarcastically thanking Lizza for making clear that Obama is "shepherding" the country through this age of "appeasement and decline." He wants Republicans to take note: "How do you defeat a leader from behind? With a leader from the front." The party, therefore, needs a "workhorse, not a show horse."