But great challenges are actually what make up the stuff of great leaders, and regrettably, Barack Obama -- though mesmerizing on many levels -- has demonstrated thus far more of an ability to deliver policy outcomes generated by inertia and incrementalism rather than changing the laws of political gravity, which is what he must do if he is to succeed in office.

Barack Obama can’t be measured by the same stick as most American presidents. He must be better and do more. We are at a time of historical discontinuity in U.S. history -- a point at which America’s global social contract with other of the world’s stakeholders must be renegotiated and when America must reinvent itself, its economy and its relationship with citizens on the domestic front. As Walter Russell Mead recently proclaimed at a New America Foundation event grading Obama’s performance, “Being president is really hard.”

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Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Carter, said he believed Bush's team had laid a track leading to a single course of action: a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Scowcroft, who was NSA to Presidents Ford and the first Bush, held out hope that the current President Bush would hold fire and not make an already disastrous situation for the U.S. in the Middle East even worse.

The 18 people at the party, including former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, then voted with a show of hands for either Brzezinski's or Scowcroft's position. Scowcroft got only two votes, including his own. Everyone else at the table shared Brzezinski's fear that a U.S. strike against Iran is around the corner.

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