Responds to Walter Russell Mead’s blistering critique of his foreign policy:

I won’t criticize or correct his cute and erroneous oversimplistic distortions of presidential biographies and history except when he refers specifically to me. I resent Mead’s use of such phrases as “in the worst scenario, turn him [Obama] into a new Jimmy Carter,” “weakness and indecision,” and “incoherence and reversals” to describe my service. An especially aggravating error is his claiming, “by the end of his tenure he was supporting the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, increasing the defense budget, and laying the groundwork for an expanded U.S. presence in the Middle East.” None of these were late decisions based on a tardy realization of my earlier errors and misjudgments.