Cleaning Up Obama’s Foreign Policy Mess

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Commentary Magazine:

What is America’s purpose in the world? At the end of 2016, with Barack Obama’s two-term presidency coming to a close, the question seems almost outmoded. Not only does the United States currently have no national purpose; the very idea of a national purpose is now unfashionable. This is the logical result of eight years of American political leadership devoted to minimizing American global leadership.

 

In our democratic republic, we choose presidents who reflect the national mood, and they in turn lead a nation that becomes a reflection of them. In 2008, Americans were tired of the war in Iraq and elected Barack Obama on his promise to end that war—but he had a far larger retreat in mind. Pursuing a staunchly progressive worldview, Obama would oversee the withdrawal of American power around the globe. Yet as his vision of a better world lost out to the reality of a much more treacherous one, he refused to change course. Responding to the new threats would have distilled for the country a new sense of national purpose—something Obama expressly feared. In exacerbating and then downplaying a rising global wave of theocratic and secular tyranny, the president has left our sense of national purpose in a shambles. And having done so, he will depart the White House with the free world at great risk.

 

Obama was, in some sense, the right man at the right time. Opposed to the Iraq war from the start, he could claim credibly to have seen well in advance the hardships that would follow from George W. Bush’s post-9/11 foreign policy. After witnessing five years of brutal fighting without a clear pronouncement of American victory, the country had come around to Obama’s anti-war view.

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Cleaning Up Obama’s Syria Mess

 

On September 10, in Geneva, Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced a cease-fire agreement in Syria—the second one this year. It was supposed to be a breakthrough for diplomacy, but within the hour of its implementation, the ceasefire began collapsing. The predictable failure of this “peace plan” offers yet more evidence of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Obama administration’s approach to this conflict, which has become the greatest strategic and humanitarian disaster of the 21st century.

 

Since the start of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, more than 400,000 people have been killed and a greater if unknown number injured. Another 11 million people have been driven out of their homes, including 4.8 million who have been forced to flee the country. The war has turned more than half of Syria’s prewar population of 22 million people into fatalities or refugees. That mass migration has severely affected not just neighboring countries but Europe as well; the influx of refugees is sparking fears of terrorism and leading to a right-wing backlash across the Continent that may have helped convince British voters to leave the European Union.

 

Those fears are rooted in the fact that the Syrian war has created a breeding ground for extremist organizations, the two most notorious being ISIS and the Syria Conquest Front (formerly the Al Nusra Front, the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria). ISIS has become a magnet for jihadists from all over the world, some of whom have already returned to their countries of origin to commit acts of terrorism. The group’s propaganda and its aura of success have inspired another breed of terrorists in such places as St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Orlando, Florida. And Syria has attracted not only Sunni extremists but their Shiite counterparts as well. The Bashar al-Assad regime has been able to hold on to power only with the help of Hezbollah and other Iranian-controlled Shiite militias that play an increasingly prominent role in government-held areas. Moreover, with its actions in Syria, Russia has now assumed its largest role in the Middle East since the height of the Cold War.

 

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/cleaning-up-obama-syria-mess/

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Wage of Arrogance

Chilton Williamson Jr. - OCTOBER 01, 2016

A quarter-century

of American diplomatic arrogance toward Russia, and the exploitation and temporary ruination of the Russian economy by the combined forces of Washington, Wall Street, and the Harvard Economics Department, are currently reaping their just deserts. (See “Wreckers and Builders,” by Anne Williamson.) Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the possibility for rapprochement between the United States and Russia was a real possibility. (Kissinger did not wait on the fall of the People’s Republic of China to establish relations with Beijing.) But America’s smugly superior hectoring of the Kremlin to turn the country into a liberal democracy in the Western style, having made reconciliation impossible, further ensured that the Russians would do just the opposite of what the Americans wished, domestically and abroad—and not just the “near abroad.” In short, the United States created her own new rival over the grave of the old one. Because the Russian establishment lives in the real world, and its American counterpart in a make-believe one,

 

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2016/November/40/11/magazine/article/10836928/

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Syria’s Civil War Is Over—Russia Won

 

It’s time to accept the painful reality of Syria’s fratricide

 

By John R. Schindler • 10/26/16 10:45am

It’s not every day an American presidential candidate flatly says his opponent will cause World War Three. But Donald Trump did just that yesterday, accusing Hillary Clinton of recklessly seeking confrontation with Russia over Syria—where, he claims, the Democratic nominee is insufficiently worried about the Islamic State.

 

“What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” Trump stated in Florida at his Trump National Doral golf resort. “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.” He then hinted at possible nuclear Armageddon caused by Hillary’s recklessness. http://observer.com/2016/10/syrias-civil-war-is-over-russia-won/

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Foreign Policy Course Correction

by Thomas H. Henriksen via Strategika

 

Monday, October 31, 2016

Barack Obama’s retrenchment policies may be unprecedented in degree, but not in kind. Other presidents have implemented pullbacks from an overseas engagement, usually after a war. These retreats have all been followed by pendulum swings back toward re-engagement. This pattern will, no doubt, hold after Obama. Historical determinism does not account for the oscillations, which are instead due to partisanship between the major political parties, domestic considerations, and ideological convictions of the commanders-in-chief as well as the need for course corrections. http://www.hoover.org/research/foreign-policy-course-correction

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Leaving Behind “Leading From Behind”

by Mark Moyarvia Strategika

 

Monday, October 31, 2016

In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned as a foreign policy moderate, wary of the aggressive interventionism of the George W. Bush administration but willing to take on a leading role for America in combating particularly ominous threats. While promising to pull the remaining American forces out of Iraq, he vowed to send additional troops to Afghanistan. He said that he would collaborate with other nations to a greater extent than Bush, but at the same time served notice that he would act unilaterally when vital U.S. interests were at stake.

 

During his first years as president, Obama generally conformed to these pledges. He authorized several increases in the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. He began withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, at a slower pace than promised in the campaign, but one that nonetheless put the administration on a course for complete withdrawal. He worked with foreign allies on trade deals, and used drones unilaterally against extremists in Pakistan.

 

The foreign policy of Obama underwent profound change in 2011, a year that saw the departure of Robert Gates and other career foreign policy heavyweights. During 2011, Obama pressured Congress into steep cuts to the defense budget, http://www.hoover.org/research/leaving-behind-leading-behind