meghan o'sullivan and elliott abbrams, both top officials in the national security council in the georgebush administration. both national security advisors. meghan is professor of international affairs at harvard's kennedy school and abrams is a fellow at the middle east studies. peter beinart, a senior columnist and senior fellow at new america and cnn political commentator. i hope everyone is happy with that lead-in. so you begin this collection of essays on obama with a pretty favorable reading of his foreign policy, why? >> i think actually the president has done a pretty decent job on foreign policy. the way to consider a president's foreign policy record is to see him as a member of a relay race. and the fact is that u.s. foreign policy has been largely constant in its broadest outlines since the late 1940s, building a strong, liberal international order with democracies cooperating with each other. trading, nestling under a u.s. security umbrella. it started in the cold war and expanded in the bill clinton and george h.w. bush administrations. it got off track during the george w