Russia’s handling of Edward Snowden is just the latest example of President Obama’s failure to “grasp the cruel game of nations”, notes Josef Joffe, who teaches U.S. foreign policy at Stanford University.

Joffe (the author of the soon-to-be published book, “The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies“) recently offered his analysis in The Wall Street Journal:

Why did Mr. Putin decide to thumb his nose at the U.S. after playing cat-and-mouse for six weeks? Easy—because he could. He has taken the measure of Barack Obama, concluding that there isn’t much there there, to paraphrase the president on the State Department’s emails about Benghazi.

The Russian leader has been checking off the weak spots since Mr. Obama’s 2009 inauguration—in disbelief at first, no doubt, then with growing brashness. It started with the Cairo speech in June of that year, where Mr. Obama made nice to the Islamic Middle East, Iran included. A few months later came the White House cave-in on a Europe-based antimissile system the Russians had vehemently opposed. This was part of the celebrated “reset”—but Moscow got to pocket something for nothing, a no-no in great-power politics.

The Kremlin has also noticed how Mr. Obama has basically scotched the military option against Iran’s nuclear-arms program. So has the Khamenei regime in Tehran, which keeps enticing Washington with talks resembling a minuet: bow, circle, return to the starting point. In Libya, the U.S. was “leading from behind,” in Syria, not at all. Cutting the defense budget has been the order of the day, with or without the sequester.

So if you’re Vladimir Putin, why not probe more deeply?

Consider the gauntlets flung down by Russia earlier this year. One is the delivery of sophisticated Yakhont antiship missiles to the Assad regime in Syria. Hard to detect and even harder to destroy, these missiles would pose a serious threat to U.S. naval forces if the weapons were ever deployed to the eastern Mediterranean. Israel regarded the danger sufficient to level a storage site in Syria’s port city of Latakia on July 5.

Joffe concludes:

It took Jimmy Carter only three years to grasp the cruel game of nations. And what it takes to be the “indispensable nation,” a term coined by another Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Mr. Obama seems to have forgotten that he used exactly the same words a year ago: “America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs.” There is no other.