Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, A Matter of Principle, and the recently published Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

Several months ago in this space, on slight twinklings of accelerated economic growth, confirmation of the path to energy self-sufficiency, conciliatory noises to the Republicans, and (prayerfully hopeful) signs that the president’s irrational preoccupation with arms control might cause him to do something about the Iranian nuclear program, I dared to write that he could be the first president since James Monroe whose second term would be better than his first. That was not a very high bar, as I am unable to find any positive accomplishments of his administration in its first term. Despite my frequent expressions of under-appreciation of this administration, I always hope the president of the United States does well, and am eager to seize any plausible pretext to be positive.

But it is really an insuperable challenge to put any positive face on the events of the past few weeks. As I wrote here last week, it is impossible to imagine what the president thinks he is doing in Syria. And the brush-off he received at the G-8 meeting in Northern Ireland last week from Vladimir Putin, the head of the Russian thugdom that by fraud and force rules the shriveled remnant of the country that imploded after 45 years of trying to rival America, appears to be a new nadir in the self-abasement of the U.S. presidency....