"They want a veto in sensitive foreign policy issues, including on Israel and Iran — any policy that can implicate the country in a foreign confrontation.
President Bush has now been tested by his first foreign policy confrontation and his first major negotiation with Congress over a domestic policy issue, namely tax cuts.
The attempt to close the prison has entailed tense negotiations with foreign officials, heated confrontations during meetings in the White House Situation Room, and, especially, a long-running fight with the Pentagon, which outplayed Obama for years.
Historians will certainly be struck by the degree to which military confrontations with foreign governments have dominated the first two years of this first post-Cold War Presidency.
Their fears that desperately poor countries will tolerate low wages, unsafe workplaces and union busting in the name of free trade and foreign investment sparked angry confrontations last year at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization and are quite likely to resurface this month at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Prague.
But the repression is particularly striking now, as the kingdom adopts a more activist foreign policy, risking larger confrontations with Iran, and as Washington hopes to stabilize the region following the expected collapse of the ISIS caliphate.
The agency could have invoked its power of "special inspections," but this would have constituted an act of confrontation wholly foreign to the I.A.E.A.'s nature.
And plunging into the pages of Scientific American was indeed something of a culture shock, a confrontation with foreign language on every page: "supersymmetry," "quantum chromodynamics," "sauropods" and book titles like "Cancellations Beyond Finiteness in N=8 Supergravity at Three Loops".
But Mr. Romney's attempt to use the event to draw a contrast with Mr. Obama on foreign policy started a confrontation that landed him on the defensive and drew attention away from questions about Mr. Obama's handling of uprisings in the Arab world.
Mr. Bush has been widely praised for his administration's discipline, the speed with which he won consensus for what will likely prove to be one of the biggest tax cuts since the Reagan era, and the largely successful way he faced his first foreign challenge, an unexpected confrontation with China.
Between the carpets, two back-to-back televisions, one usually tuned to Fox News and the other to CNN — you can guess which direction each television faced — beamed out the foreign-policy-focused confrontation between the candidates.
