This should have been Barack Obama's year. The world expected so much, and in his first weeks he did not disappoint: an inspiring inaugural speech; spellbinding oratory in Cairo, where he pledged a new covenant between Islam and the west; and an activist domestic agenda with economic recovery and healthcare reform at its heart.

By year's end, the US president was bloody and bowed. After weeks of deliberation and mounting casualties, he authorised a 30,000-strong troop surge in Afghanistan, reawakening the ghosts of Vietnam. His healthcare reforms had stalled, having failed to garner Republican support on Capitol Hill. He had travelled more than any single US president in his first year. He had repaired America's image (hardly a Herculean task after the Bush years). But the man whom The Economist dubbed the “quiet American” had in turn raised doubts about the firmness of US leadership.

The photograph of Obama bowing in front of the Japanese emperor on his visit to Tokyo en route to China captures these conflicting perspectives. But like all pictures, the image does not tell the whole story. At home, the president's travails reflected the scale of his challenge: an economy brought to its knees by the collapse of the banking system; a political system whose checks and balances are biased toward inaction; and a noxious atmosphere in which demagogic talk-show hosts compared his reforms to Nazism and cast doubt on his place of birth and therefore his claim to citizenship. The death of Senator Ted Kennedy, one of the few Democrats capable of reaching across the aisle, only served to underline the decline of bipartisanship in Washington.