What American Power Can't Do

Judah Grunstein's two cents on Obama's emphasis on soft power:

The danger of Obama's overly ambitious and unrealistic rhetoric, like all overly ambitious and unrealistic rhetoric, is in raising expectations, both domestically and abroad, about the transformative capacity of American power, at a time when a smart foreign policy would attempt to downsize those expectations. And as Hampton implied, increased expectations tend to lead to hubris and mission creep. The fact that there's a collective longing for the kind of shift to soft power that Obama emphasizes, both domestically and abroad, only makes the temptation to overestimate its capacities even greater.