At the same time something rankles when they hear talk of American decline and the end of the American century and China rising. They want a president to stand tall for American greatness if only to anaesthetize them against day-to-day hardship.

Republican wannabes sense all this. To judge by the early stages of the 2012 campaign, they think foreign policy might matter after all. They’re trying to cast Barack Obama as a president who has sold America short, an impostor who has ditched the mystical belief in the unique calling of the United States that is American exceptionalism.

So Mitt Romney says Obama takes his values not from the small towns of America but from “the capitals of Europe.” Obama treats Israel the way European countries do — with “suspicion” and “distrust.” He’s offering “European answers to American problems.” He’s projecting a weak United States: “We’re following the French into Libya .” The president is a naïve idealist undermined by his “questioning as to whether America is an exceptional nation.”

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For Europe, in the above characterization, read land of feckless socialists on welfare bent on universal health care.

Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich has decrypted in Obama a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.

Gingrich wants a “foreign policy that is clear about the evil that we face” — that would be Shariah law among other things — and rooted in this universalist message: “America is still the last, best hope of mankind on Earth.”

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As for Sarah Palin , she attributes most of Obama’s problems to what she’s called his “lack of faith in American exceptionalism.”

I have several reactions to this that all fit under the rubric: baloney! First, we’re not in 1990 any longer: America remains dominant but cannot resolve major problems alone and will in the next decade, by some estimates, see China overtake it as the world’s largest economy.

Second, it’s precisely Republican factionalism in Washington that’s stopping the United States from attaining again the greatness Republicans invoke. Remember James Madison’s admonition to “break and control the violence of faction” through a “well-constructed Union.”

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Right now factionalism leaves critical budget challenges unmet, stops serious investment in education and research, and leaves America trailing China on the green technologies that will be big job-creators in coming decades. The road to the American future is not “Drill, Baby, Drill!”

Third, it’s just delusional to imagine that any president, Republican or Democrat, confronted by the meltdown of 2008, would not have seen as a core task a retrenchment of U.S. overseas commitments in an attempt to bring them in line with diminished resources.

But with an angry, anxious nation, Republicans are betting that invocations of greatness and dominance, however illusory, will resonate. Bruce Jentleson, a political scientist at Duke University , said, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden , they can’t attack Obama as a wimp, but they will attack him as not being a real American.” Obama, he added, must answer by demonstrating “what this generation of Americans is going to show the world, how it’s going to compete in a global era. Against the illusion of restoration, he must offer adaptation.”

With the U.S. economy wobbling, Obama runs the Bush Sr. risk. He got Bin Laden and has been on the right side of the Arab Spring — what Timothy Garton Ash has called “the most hopeful set of events in the 21st century so far, comparable in scale and potential to 1989.” Americans respond to that kind of hope. They care about foreign policy and see through foreign posturing. What they need now from Obama is a better sense of how their economy can thrive in this changed world.