Leslie Gelb is part of the furniture in the American foreign policy community. He's a former head of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior bureaucrat. His new book, Power Rules, is hot off the press.

Gelb also co-authored, with the now Vice President of the United States, Joseph R. Biden, a plan for salvaging Iraq back in 2006. (The plan consisted of five key points, though the predicate of the entire plan was decentralisation. It was panned by optimists on the hawkish side of the perspective, like Senator John McCain and others, for placing the political integrity and future of that nation in peril unwisely. The plan was lauded by many others.)

Now, Gelb has written up a memo for The Daily Beast, reviewing Mr. Obama's recently concluded trip to east Asia.

President Obama's nine-day trip to Asia is worth a look back to fix two potent problems, past and future. First, the trip's limited value per day of presidential effort suggests a disturbing amateurishness in managing America's power. On top of the inexcusably clumsy review of Afghan policy and the fumbling of Mideast negotiations, the message for Mr. Obama should be clear: He should stare hard at the skills of his foreign-policy team and, more so, at his own dominant role in decision-making. Something is awry somewhere, and he's got to fix it.

I agree with this assessment. Obama's got nothing or next-to-nothing to show on the most pressing international files. Climate change, reform of financial markets, Chinese currency manipulation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, North Korean and Iranian nuclear programmes, etc. And it's not just that he and his administration are fumbling the issues of the day. He's missing the big picture/long term stuff, too.

If most Asia hands inside and outside the government had designed the Obama trip, here's what they would have advised: Go beyond the usual and trite message of building mutual understanding and cooperation, and stop invoking the God of Multilateralism without spelling out America's leadership role. ... Asian nations are increasingly organizing themselves into these groups, and Washington hasn't really figured out its role. Most Asian nations want that role to be a prominent one-in fact, the leadership position. They're afraid of China, afraid that China won't be as attentive to their concerns in the future as America was in the past. At the same time, they don't want Washington to come into these groupings and cause problems with Beijing. They want Washington to figure out a leadership position constructed on the proven American ability to help solve common problems in the common interest. They want an America they remember, one that can get things done and doesn't let problems fester.

That U.S. policy was the main missing ingredient on Obama's trip.

The administration is obsessed with process. They want America to be liked. Admittedly, they may want to achieve this for a good and hard-headed reason: because being liked makes it easier for foreign governments to co-operate with you. Mr. Obama has himself explained that this is the logic of his administration's tack on diplomacy. That only matters if it works.

Does he want to be liked or does he want America to win?