Cap-and-read

David Rothkopf has an incisive post-mortem on Obama's Asian trip, the upshot being that Obama is reaping the bitter of harvest of Bush's destruction of U.S. economic power and prestige.

A perhaps unintended pun in the headline is telling, I think -- or at least my inadvertent response is:

The perils of America's Pacific presidency

I had to check back whether "Pacific" was capitalized (maybe because of the triple alliteration).  Obama's approach to world affairs is more pacific than Bush's (and perhaps prior presidents') by design, by necessity (in large part thanks to Bush's disastrous foregin gambits and tax cuts), and by character and inclination. "Pacific" needn't mean "weak" -- the coming age should be about leading by example and building multilateral coalitions and institutions (see here and here).  But weakness is a worry -- as Krugman once again forcefully suggests.