From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

In the Middle East, where U.S. military involvement and diplomacy are most closely watched, President Obama is held in lower regard in the Arab world than President Bush was in the last year of his presidency.

Obama is not only less liked than the supposedly hated Bush, he can’t even hold a candle to Iran’s grubby, menacing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Zogby reports that in Egypt, 31% of Egyptians agree with Iran’s policies compared with 3% for Obama’s, with similar figures in Jordan. Among Egyptians, just 5% hold a favorable attitude toward the U.S. compared with 9% in 2008.

[…]Clinton will do no better in bilateral talks with the Turks — a nation that has moved so far away from its long alliance with the U.S. it can only be called a former ally — on Syria, Iran and Israel/Palestine.

In these countries, Obama’s policy can be summed up in a litany of ineffectual maneuvers.

On Syria, the first move was to succor, then to scold as the dictatorship indifferently sheds streams of blood in the streets of Damascus — showing the fundamental disconnect between what the brutal Syrian regime is and what the Obama administration thinks it is.

After throwing Tunisia and Egypt, two pro-Western allies, overboard, the administration ineffectually grasps a problem in Syria as the bodies pile up.

On Iran, Obama policy shows even more weakness. The president wasted two years coddling the monster regime that threatens a region of more than a billion people. He missed a chance to support a student uprising in 2009 and now watches as Iran’s illegal nuclear program speeds ahead with little fear of consequences, more brazen and closer to realization.

Whatever this learning-curve policy amounts to, it garners no international respect.

Then there’s the stance the White House has taken on Israel, abusively telling its ally to retreat to 1967 borders. It emboldened provocations from Palestinian terrorist groups and showed the rest of the Arab world that it pays more to be America’s enemy than its friend. Now the Arab League is moving to recognize Palestine.

It turns out that what foreign powers respect is strength, not weakness.