Source: PBS NewsHour

President Obama's first year in office was marked with global summits, a Nobel peace prize, and attempts to reach out to the Muslim world and enter a dialogue with Iran.

He withdrew troops from cities in Iraq and increased troops in Afghanistan. He tried to defibrillate the Mideast peace process.

Douglas Paal takes a look at the state of U.S. foreign policy a year into Mr. Obama's term:

Now that a year has passed, "we're starting to enter a kind of crunch period where we're going to find out whether a new diplomatic approach is enough to change the calculations of the actors in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Jerusalem, and in Palestine to a new approach to accommodate the attempts of the Obama administration to make change," said Paal. "That looks less likely to happen than likely, although we might get lucky somewhere -- for example, in Iran. And in Asia, I think we're going to find that some of this will prove to have been a period of reconsolidation of American influence in the region, which is a good thing but not an avenue to solution of a lot of big problems which will persist as they did under the Bush administration."