Dangerously irrelevant

To some degree this was inevitable. If you hew to an ideological rather than realist foreign policy, there will always be an inertial drag back towards realism as the players manage their own interests.

When your administration is weakened and discredited, they're going to stop listening to you, and you lose control of how things shape out.

Just days after President Bush returned from the Middle East, the Middle East is moving beyond the Bush administration.

Two major peace efforts -- a surprise announcement of indirect talks between Israel and Syria brokered by Turkey and an eleventh-hour deal to prevent a new Lebanese war brokered by Qatar -- were launched without an American role, and both counter U.S. strategy in the region....

The United States is not playing a role in other critical Middle East initiatives, Ottaway noted, including an Egyptian effort to reconcile the two major Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, and negotiations between Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council sheikdoms. The Bush administration is absent "across the board," she said.

And, further east......

Pakistan's new government has signed a peace deal with Islamic militants in a valley of northwestern Pakistan, in a process that Western officials worry could take the pressure off Taliban and al Qaeda hardliners.

Indeed, part of it is lame duck, but, I would argue that an equal part is all the political capital and goodwill wasted on ideological fantasy policies and the perception of a US weakened by overextension in Iraq and an overextended economy.

The provinces are defying the weakened empire.