David Rothkopf is unhappy that Obama’s foreign policy is more or less exactly what he said it would be:

America may not publicly thumb its noses at the international system that it created, but neither has it renounced the elements of that system that anachronistically and anti-democratically give special privileges and disproportionate power to the victors of a war that ended almost seven decades ago.

Perhaps it was the fact that Obama’s father was born in Kenya or that he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia that led the world to think he would embrace a different approach.

I don’t know that “the world” ever expected this. If people outside the U.S. made this mistake, most of them have the excuse of not following the 2008 campaign as closely as Americans. The people who really have no excuse for not knowing what Obama would do are the Americans who voted for him. There are very few things that Obama has done on foreign policy that could not have been foreseen by paying attention to his policy positions, voting record, and public speeches. If Obama represents “exceptionalism-lite,” he made no secret of it. The idea that Obama’s heritage or biography suited him to change U.S. foreign policy dramatically and suddenly was always a far-fetched and somewhat insulting one, as if living abroad for a few years predisposes a person to support radical U.N. Security Council reform (or any other dramatic changes in how the U.S. conducts itself abroad).

Security Council reform is a strange example of Obama’s failure to bring about transformation, since there was never reason to expect that Obama would do much to change the way the council works. It is also a useful indicator of how completely unrealistic some of the expectations about how Obama would change U.S. foreign policy were. Restructuring the Security Council would require the cooperation and support of the other permanent members. It would be difficult, controversial, and there would be virtually no domestic political reward (and possibly quite a lot of resistance). Obama never gave any indication that he was interested in “renouncing” the elements of the international system that give the U.S. a privileged position. One can easily imagine the horrified backlash from people who cannot cope with the reality of a multipolar world if Obama had set out to institutionalize multipolarity. Obama’s critique of many Bush-era policies was not that they were hegemonistic, but that they were incompetently executed and/or counterproductive. Before there is any chance that the U.S. government will abandon the “enduring view that there should be one set of rules and privileges for America and rich countries and another for the world’s poor,” we would need to have an administration that is not filled with people who accept this view wholeheartedly.