Roger Cohen seems to have suffered a blow to the head that's left him disoriented. How else to explain these opening lines from his column this morning?

BRUSSELS — The passage of the U.S. health care bill is a major foreign policy victory for President Barack Obama.

It empowers him by demonstrating his ability to deliver. Nowhere is that more important than in the Middle East.

Yes, I'm sure the leaders of Hamas are so impressed by Obama's "stick-to-it-ive-ness" on health care that they're going to sit right down and be reasonable in negotiating with Israel. And I'll bet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will stop building nuclear weapons, too, now that 32 million more Americans will get health insurance coverage starting in 2014.

I jest, of course, because it's utter fantasy to argue that health care is some sort of "foreign policy victory" for Obama. It's certainly a domestic victory for the President - and a better outcome for him than the alternative - though the most recent polls provide a decidedly mixed picture of just how much he's gained politically from it at home.

Another nit to pick in Cohen's column is this little ditty:

It fell to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to play the role Khrushchev once played in toughening a young American president.

The former Soviet leader thought he could browbeat Kennedy only to discover, in Vienna, that the Kennedy charm was not unalloyed to steel (“It will be a long, cold winter.”) Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to think he could steamroll Obama. He earned a frosty comeuppance.

The analogy is fine, so long as you ignore the fact that Krushchev was the leader of America's Cold War arch enemy while Netanyahu leads a country that is America's greatest ally in the Middle East and a country with whom we've had a long, deep, and unique relationship for the last six decades.

UPDATE: A reader points out something I skipped right over: namely, that Cohen's analogy is bogus on historical grounds as well:

Additionally, Cohen's comparison is absurd even from Cohen's own point-of-view, because (contrary to his claim) Kennedy WAS browbeaten and steamrolled by Khrushchev at Vienna. Kennedy sadly admitted to his aides that Nikita treated him "like I was a little boy" and that -- if not in so many words -- he felt out of his depth. For his part, Khrushchev sensed deep confusion and weakness on Kennedy's part, and two months later the Berlin Wall went up, virtually overnight. Also, JFK's apparent weakness in Vienna greatly emboldened the Kremlin in its tentative decision to send nukes to Cuba. Kennedy's effective do-nothing response to the construction of the Berlin Wall also played a role, of course.

UPDATE: Daniel Larison has more in the same vein.

--------------------------------------------
Follow the RCP Blog on Twitter.
Become a fan of RCP on Facebook.
--------------------------------------------