All in all, 2013 has been a bad year for the Western world and it all boils down to one reason: a dismal failure of leadership. The tarnished standing of Mr Obama at home has paralleled and compounded, in 2013, the decline of the US' ability to shape events abroad. The White House erred in its support for Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and sunk into quasi-irrelevance as Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi ignored the US president's call. It was left to Vladimir Putin - of all people - to step in and engineer some semblance of face-saving for the head of the world's...
