‘Leading from behind’ meets ‘hiding behind Uncle Sam’

When the Obama administration and the Aquino administration negotiated the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), it was a case of two governments with inchoate foreign policies groping for a deal that might lift them from the policy fog in which they found themselves. There was little effort on both sides to fully understand the foreign policy and security thinking of the other.

In Washington, DC, Barack Obama’s foreign policy is unflatteringly characterized by the media and by Democrats and Republicans alike as “Leading from behind.” The phrase embodies what is weak and vacillating about Obama’s leadership in a world that is churning fatefully in Europe and in the Middle East.