IMHO, it's veiled satire.
Really?
I trust your opinion. I’ll read it again in that light. It did strike me as a complete reversal of his general perspective.
In the first paragraph if we substitute Obama and Bush, we get:
Soon Obama will be barnstorming the country, second-guessing Bush's decision-making, giving him no benefit of the doubt, and adopting simplistic answers as a candidate that he could not possibly embrace as Commander-in-Chief — the one constant being that whatever Bush does, Obama, without the responsibilities of office, will argue that it was wrong.
It's not. I "empathize" with Obama's difficulties just as much as VDH does.
We've all been confronted from time to time by what we've said we would do, and discovering that things are not so simple after all -- the real world rarely cooperates with our assumptions; and in cases where we are faced with actual nemeses, "the world" often actively opposes our assumptions.
Obama's love of the Grand Gesture has certainly set him up for tremendous difficulties in that regard, and VDH has correctly pointed that out: NK and Iran are out for themseves, which places them in dangerous opposition to the civilized world; and Obama's words can do nothing to prevent it.
VDH is also quite correct in pointing out a true fact about American politics: political opposition has decayed to a groups of politicians who "adopting simplistic answers as a candidate that [they] could not possibly embrace as Commander-in-Chief..."
Which is to say, we live in a nation governed by political opportunists whose devotion to principles of statesmanship is tenuous at best.
Obama can expect little if any cooperation from the GOP, even if he's got good ideas.
And, as we've already seen, any aggressive move that the GOP might support, brings cries of outrage from Obama's base.
The ghastly state of contemporary political discourse would seem to preclude even honest debate, much less useful discussion.
Obama is in a very, very difficult position. And if he is, we are.