ANNALS OF “SMART DIPLOMACY:” Anatomy of a whole-of-government foreign policy failure: The Asian Infrastructure Development Bank is proceeding apace, despite U.S. efforts to stop it.

To recap: the AIIB is one of several new financial institutions that China has tried to midwife over the past year or so that many have viewed as direct competitors to the U.S.-created international financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank (ADB). The United States has articulated two concerns about the AIIB: that it was an organization designed to marginalize the ADB, and that in doing so, China would be applying rules and standards in project lending that would be far less friendly to the environment than the U.S.-led institutions.

Whether these concerns are overstated or not isn’t the point. The point is that in recent weeks the Obama administration’s year-long effort to delegitimize and marginalize the AIIB has failed and failed spectacularly. First Britain announced that it would be a founding member of the AIIB against U.S. wishes, surprising even Chinese officials. And then the other dominoes started to fall in rapid succession. Germany, France, and Itally quickly followed suit.

Now we’re seeing a cascade effect. South Korea announced that it would join. Both Australia and Japan now look set to join. Hell, even the IMF’s Christine Lagarde signaled that she was looking forward to working with the AIIB.

The Obama administration has been reduced to backbiting U.S. allies in the press — which, by the by, is a passive-aggressive habit that it really should stop.

But at least they’re not testosterone-addled brutes, amirite?