By Peter Foster - World - Last updated: October 30th, 2013
*** Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.
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So Barack Obama has been bumped off the top spot of the annual Forbes list of the most powerful 72 people on the planet – one for every 100m of population – by the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Of course this is a cheap publicity stunt by Forbes to draw attention to their list, so I'm guilty of falling for that, but it is also yet another clear indicator of how rapidly Mr Obama's star is waning both at home and abroad.
No doubt, Mr Obama in theory has more projectable power, both hard and soft, at his disposal than Mr Putin but Mr Obama too often fails to wield it.
That's the magazine's basic point, explaining that Mr Putin takes the top spot "because he so frequently shows his strength at home and on the global stage" citing the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the recent chess match over Syria as examples.
Listening this morning to old speeches of Winston Churchill being played as his bust is unveiled in the capitol, the spine stiffens as the great man thunders about the need to exhibit "unconquerable willpower" in the face of adversity. The world, and America's place in it, is more complicated today, but those words are a sharp reminder Mr Obama's fundamental shortcoming as a leader.
If George W Bush represented leadership without analysis, then Barack Obama has swung to the other extreme: he's all analysis, and no leadership.
His handling of the Syria crisis is the most crushing example of his personal lack of conviction which has been obscured by the desire of a war-weary publics on both sides of the Atlantic to avoid a confrontation over chemical weapons, even as Assad is entrenched and the slaughter by conventional weapons continues apace.
Mr Obama spent two years operating an "anything for a quiet life" policy on Syria, ignore the advice of allies and advisers not to allow a vacuum to form. Then, when that vacuum was filled with clouds of sarin gas, he belatedly stamped his feet and spoke of American exceptionalism and the need to defend "universal values", even as balked at the same responsibilities to which he paid lip-service by passing the buck to Congress.
And then when Congress and the American public refused to back him, he just looked strangely baffled.
Putin is a rascal and a strongman, and he understands the nature of power and how to wield it. The world is worse off for the fact that, these last five years, there's been no one in the White House to hold him in check.
*** 63 Comments
__ joy 52 an hour ago
America's place in the world has been precisely complicated by Obama's incompetence.
No one has forgotten, Peter, that you cheerlead your lovely Obama into office. That you turn your back on that fact now only magnifies your own journalistic failings.
You sold us out and now you sell yourself out.
__ Preunit an hour ago
AIPAC, who've had Obama in their pockets since Netanyahu gave him a public bollocking in the Oval Office, must be wondering what the hell they can do about Putin. Can you imagine the unfairness of it? A president of a sovereign nation who fails to drop to his knees before the Zionist State? Who puts the interests of his own people before those of the Israelis! Christ, it must be driving them up the wall. What's the solution... probably to send him to his maker if he carries on the way he has.
Read more: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peterfoster/100243722/putin-beats-obama-to-top-of-forbes-list-a-sign-of-how-far-and-fast-the-us-presidents-star-has-waned/
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"America's place in the world has been precisely complicated by Obama's incompetence."
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