The United Arab Emirates on Tuesday pledged to give up to $1 million to help equip high school students in the tornado-ravaged city of Joplin with laptop computers for the coming school year. The gift materialized after United Arab Emirates officials read an Associated Press story in late June about the school system's struggles.

Standard & Poor's downgrade of U.S. debt, along with the political battle over the debt ceiling and a faltering U.S. economy, will siphon away the time President Barack Obama has to deal with foreign policy issues. CFR's James M. Lindsay says that while the United States remains the world's dominant power, the downgrade strengthens the hand of those who argue that it is "in terminal decline."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr., 16 Japanese youth baseball and softball players, and four coaches participating in the U.S. Department of State’s first international sports exchange with Japan. The Secretary highlighted the role of sports to empower young people worldwide...

Over the weekend, Dr. Jill Biden led a delegation to Kenya to view firsthand the situation on the ground. Dr. Biden wanted to do this trip to highlight the crisis in the Horn of Africa and help mobilize both an American response, but also a global response to a crisis that is acute but to also underscore the fact that there is a lot we can do about it; that we can get assistance to people...

Some may continue to point to the structural advantages enjoyed by the United States...of its rare combination of hard and soft power; of the fact that it remains the only serious power with true global reach... But in the current climate such facts appear to be cutting little ice with those who now insist that as result of Bush's ill-conceived war on terror, followed by the financial crisis, American decline is now a foregone conclusion.

Obama "seems to be a passive figure at a time when the world needs a leader." Obama and his advisers should pay heed to this quietly devastating observation. Even if they're right about where Obama is positioned politically, they have to worry whether all the concessions and maneuvering undercut a president's most important asset: an earned image of strength rooted in principle.

Watching the wife of the US vice-president touring the world's biggest refugee camp for famine-hit Somalis was a scrum of television cameramen, international reporters and Washington staffers thumbing their BlackBerrys. US officials privately agreed that the main thrust of the visit was to get the story onto American television channels, which have been slower to report on the crisis than in other countries.

It's the economy that will increasingly set the limits on commitments Western powers are willing to make abroad, whether in the form of military intervention or even of aid. And, on the flip side, it will be economic pain that will increasingly serve as the main driver of rebellion and political instability across the global spectrum.