Obama, the globe’s leading has-been

A few days ago there occurred one of those telling little episodes that captures the essence and folly of the Obama administration's approach to foreign policy. The meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement was being hosted last week in Iran, and the administration had urged United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon not to attend as a signal of displeasure at Tehran's serial violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Of course Mr. Ban went.

The administration's response to Mr. Ban's decision was "muted," according to the New York Times, evidently out of sympathy for his delicate position: Most U.N. member states are also members of the Non-Aligned Movement, and it's customary for U.N. secretaries-general to attend the meetings. There's also hope Mr. Ban will make a public stink in Iran about its leaders' nuclear bid or their calls to wipe out Israel. And maybe he will.

Still, there's no overlooking the central point of this tussle: In the global popularity contest between Barack Obama and Ali Khamenei, the ayatollah is winning.

For Mr. Khamenei, the meeting was meant to underscore the failure of Western attempts to isolate Iran internationally. Iran has even picked up a new friend in Mohammed Morsi, Egypt's new Islamist president, who presumably isn't too offended that there's a street in Tehran named after Anwar Sadat's killer.

For Mr. Obama, on the other hand, the meeting should serve as another reminder that his core foreign policy concept—that global popularity generates global power—has failed. No U.S. president since John F. Kennedy has come to office with more global goodwill than Mr. Obama; no U.S. president since Jimmy Carter has been so widely rebuked.

Consider the record. His failed personal effort to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. His failed personal effort to negotiate a climate-change deal at Copenhagen in 2009. His failed efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran that year and this year. His failed effort to improve America's public standing in the Muslim world with the now-forgotten Cairo speech. His failed reset with Russia. His failed effort to strong-arm Israel into a permanent settlement freeze. His failed (if half-hearted) effort to maintain a residual U.S. military force in Iraq. His failed efforts to cut deals with the Taliban and reach out to North Korea. His failed effort to win over China and Russia for even a symbolic U.N. condemnation of Syria's Bashar Assad. His failed efforts to intercede in Europe's economic crisis. ("Herr Obama should above all deal with the reduction of the American deficit" was the free advice German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble offered this year.)

President Barack Obama.

In June, the Pew Research Center released one of its periodic surveys of global opinion. It found that since 2009, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. had slipped nearly everywhere in the world except Russia and, go figure, Japan. George W. Bush was more popular in Egypt in the last year of his presidency than Mr. Obama is today.

It's true that these surveys need to be taken with a grain of salt: efficacy, not popularity, is the right measure by which to judge an administration's foreign policy. But that makes it more noteworthy that this administration should fail so conspicuously on its own terms. Mr. Obama has become the Ruben Studdard of the world stage: the American Idol who never quite made it in the real world.

That isn't to say that Mr. Obama hasn't had his successes. The Libya intervention was a triumph, albeit of an odd sort since it was carried out in such a reluctant, last-minute, half-embarrassed fashion. Killing Osama bin Laden and dramatically expanding the number of drone strikes will forever be to the president's credit—even if his administration's tawdry efforts to publicize them for political gain will forever diminish the achievement.

But note that the drone strikes have been pursued in spite of global public opinion—the U.S. is the only country surveyed by Pew in which the strikes enjoy majority support. Note, also, that the strikes are the sort of thing Mr. Obama's core supporters would have been shrieking about incessantly in a previous administration.

For the most part, however, Mr. Obama has steadfastly pursued his belief that it's better to be loved than feared, ignoring the old Florentine's warning that "men worry less about doing an injury to one who makes himself loved than to one who makes himself feared." And so the injuries have come: disses from Putin; mockery from Ahmadinejad. Maybe Mr. Obama thinks that, as the Most Powerful Man in the World, he can breezily afford to ignore their slights, and perhaps he can. But Americans can't and shouldn't.

I tend to think that the buzz about American decline mistakes the mediocrity of the president for the destiny of the nation. But we have an election on, the outcome of which will decide whether one man's mediocrity becomes a whole nation's destiny. Mr. Obama is now the world's leading has-been, trying to revive a career on the strength of a talent that was greatly exaggerated to begin with. But a country that's willing to reward mediocrity with a second chance risks becoming a has-been itself.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com