Will Obama's administration end up as a remake of Jimmy Carter’s? Carter started out with his own take on the "audacity of hope": let's lose our "inordinate fear of communism." Toward the end of his term—the Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan—he recanted. “That action had made a more dramatic change” in his view of their true goals “than anything they have done in the previous time I have been in office.”

Two hundred and fifty days into his first term, it is now reasonably clear that Mr. Obama is heading in the same direction—if he continues to walk the road paved with good intentions. The man who knows better than most how to calculate and corral power at home, who beat the mighty Hillary machine and snipped away...