So the Obama administration says America's relations with our allies around the world can survive the latest WikiLeaks dump of U.S. diplomatic cables, and I'm inclined to agree. Truth is, the whole thing reads like a booze-addled Thanksgiving argument spun out of control, and nothing more. So the Middle East's corrupt autocrats hate each other and constantly goad the White House into taking out their garbage — big deal! God only knows the same good ol' boys will be the first to condemn us once things get tough and we choose to act. (To say nothing of Julian Assange's impending lawsuit.) In the meantime, sell the bad guys a few anti-missile defense systems and tell 'em to shut the hell up, because President Obama has one helluva lot more on his plate right now than just Iran, or North Korea, or Pakistan, or... you get the point.

But here's the bigger point: What really screams out from all these very much undiplomatic cables is how little Obama ever really broke from the Bush doctrine. I mean, in a certain way, he never really broke from it at all. Yes, there's been a laudable break from Cheney's Toughonics in terms of rhetoric, but in spirit, Obama still hasn't gotten realistic with his foreign-policy ambitions all that much. The president is constantly lecturing us about how America can't do it all, and yet consider how many plates he's trying to spin around the world. He keeps talking about how we need to accept this new world and how we can't solve any big problems on our own, but he hasn't acted like that's the case — not enough, anyway. And, quite frankly, Obama's lack of adjustment to his own articulation of a global future is starting to make America look weaker than we really are.

If I might be so bold as to warn of a strategic trilemma here: America can't simultaneously be about stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and promoting democratic regime change and unwinding our wars in a responsible fashion. Something's got to give, on multiple fronts:

Iran

If we want to stop Ahmadinejad's reach for the bomb, the simplest way forward is to flat-out pledge that we won't start military strikes — much less invasion — and, of course, to acknowledge the brute-force legitimacy of the dictatorship that has become the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Unpalatable, I know, but if we want Iran's help elsewhere, that's how you get closer to it. Nixon tried much the same with both Soviet Russia and Maoist China when dealing with Vietnam. It didn't work in either case, but look at both countries today and tell me he didn't slip them one seriously strong diplomatic Mickey.

Pakistan

Obama needs an equal sense of realism for dealing with Pakistan: We can't be all up in their grill on the enriched uranium and then expect Islamabad to be all hunky-dory with our drone strikes inside their (sort of) sovereign territory. We should be happy that it's (sort of) a democracy and they're (sort of) helping us talk to the Taliban. Sooner rather than later, we had better pick our mix of poisons here because this current cocktail sure ain't working.

North Korea (and China)

This clusterfk is mishandled, too — maybe more so: We expect to be able to lecture the Chinese on their jailed Nobel winner and their (sort of) pegged currency and their unwillingness to collapse the crazy Kim regime on their border and their insistence that we not parade our warships on their coastline and a host of other dissidents to be named later? Make your call, man. If Obama really wants Beijing to move on Pyongyang, he should bite the bullet and have Hillary Clinton offer a similar, no-regime-change pledge by signing a peace treaty with the North that finally — finally! — ends the Korean War. It's time we admitted it: We're not taking down this evil regime on Obama's watch, but we're not respecting Kim's authoritah either. And you know what? China can probably make the nuke thing go away quietly — it can vanish along the longer path to more meaningful reform. As in, economic reform that matters. Right now.

It's high time, then, for Obama to put his Nobel in the closet, get his inner Nixon on, and get to work in the one arena where John Boehner and Mitch McConnell don't share his bed. If we really want to move the ball forward instead of just keeping a bunch in the air, compromise had better start sooner than the hunt for some Australian "journalist" with a fancy Web site.

Esquire contributing editor Thomas P.M. Barnett is the author of .

PLUS: Complete Coverage of WikiLeaks on The Politics Blog >>

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