“He left empty-handed.”

In the print edition of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, this sentence comprises the entire second paragraph (it’s been changed a bit in this online edition:).

The context of this statement was President Obama’s effort in France to cajole European leaders to resolve a debt crisis that could weaken the U.S. economy. But it could just as easily have applied to virtually the entire diplomatic record of the Obama presidency.

Whether we’re talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, North Korea, Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, European nations accepting Guantanamo Bay prisoners, and even the 2016 Olympic bid (Chicago was eliminated in the first round), Obama’s diplomatic outreach efforts have been rebuffed time and time again. And it’s not simply that the Obama administration has been inept in its diplomacy; it is that this was the arena in which we were told (by Obama himself) that it would excel.

This is simply another reminder of the enormous gap that exists between words and deeds, between campaign speeches and governing achievements. Obama, a former community organizer and one-term senator, thought that it would be easy to bend the world to his will and ways. The world thought differently — and so far at least, the world is winning.

The Journal’s report may have inadvertently written the epitaph of the Obama presidency in the realm of diplomacy: “He left empty-handed.”