In his assessment of Obama’s foreign policy, Issandr El Amrani correctly describes the administration’s position on Egypt (via Andrew):

After the disbursement of US military aid (by the administration exercising its waiver) in 2012, the lack of strong reaction to the Egyptian military killing over 150 protestors and imprisoning thousands more during 2011–2012, and the lack of strong reaction to the complete perversion of the transition process (especially in the last week), I don’t think you can say the Obama administration has taken a pro-democracy position on Egypt. It’s taken a pro-status quo one.

If there is any confusion about this, it is partly because so many people initially identified Obama’s withdrawal of support for Mubarak as being the same as withdrawing support from the military regime as a whole. Many Westerners treated the SCAF coup against Mubarak as if it were a more meaningful political change than it was, which may be why the disillusionment with the sudden end of the “transition” process is greater than it otherwise would be. In fact, Obama has been able to be both anti-Mubarak and pro-SCAF without any real contradiction. The Egyptian military also turned against Mubarak when he had become a liability.

As for judging Obama’s overall record, this also seems right:

It all depends on the standards you apply. By GWB standards he’s fantastic. By US post-WW2 standards he’s alright — especially, he is cautious and pragmatic. By mainstream human rights standards he’s pretty awful, mostly because of the continued use of rendition, Guantanamo Bay, assassinations and drones — in which he continues GWB policies [bold mine-DL]. One of the more recurrent criticism of Obama is his lack of overarching doctrine, precisely because of his pragmatic case-by-case approach. The bottom line, compared with most other presidents, he’s OK and performed well in some instances, such as the Libyan intervention (in the sense that he did it in a manner that minimized possibility for US overreach, which was the stated goal), and pretty embarrassingly in other cases (Israel).

One of the election-year Republican talking points that puzzles me is the Republican insistence that Obama’s only “successes” have come from continuing Bush’s policies. As El Amrani notes, these also happen to be Obama’s most atrocious and disgraceful policies. They are the policies that are among the ugliest of Obama’s entire record, and his opponents want to make a point of associating those policies with his predecessor and the Republican Party. Republicans are happy to claim ownership of some of the worst parts of Obama’s record and claim that he is just following their example, which effectively shields him from most of the political consequences of these policies that he and his administration should have to face.