Kind of shocking he's under water now in a forum that is predominantly liberal or to the left of center.
A lot of this is because Obama’s FP legacy looking back was clearly disastrous and people only didn’t think so at the time because his predecessor was George W Bush .
Obama’s foreign policy was the strongest part of his Presidency.
No lol . Here’s a list of his foreign policy failures :
- Completely Bungled the Iraq Withdrawal: Keep in mind Iraq by 2011 was relatively peaceful and the insurgency was mostly destroyed. If Obama negotiated a status of force agreement, it would be easier to nip the rise of ISIS in the bud and also keep more American influence in the region
- Libya Intervention was a disaster: Look at how Libya has been since 2011. What Obama did in Libya was basically removing a government without doing anything to help create a replacement which obviously will be a disaster
- Funding the Syrian Rebels : Much of them turned out to be jihadists and it also helped further destabilize one of the biggest enemies against ISIS.
- Waiting too long to intervene against ISIS : Even if we withdrew , we should have launched Operation Inherent Resolve much earlier as doing so would have prevented ISIS from taking the territory they did
- Was extremely weak on Russia : He did the Russian reset after they already invaded Georgia, withdrew a plan to build a Missile defense system , and mocked the idea that they were a threat . Heck even after Russia invaded Crimea , Obama responded in an extremely weak way as he literally said Russia doing this is proof in itself they are weak and even opposed many of the actions that Trump would implement because he was afraid of overreacting too much .
Like despite the rhetoric , Obama made Donald Trump look like First Term Reagan in comparison on Russia policy . It was a complete disaster and people just conveniently forget this now
- He did nothing to stop Maduro from consolidating power
His foreign policy by any objective means was an abject disaster and clearly had a worse Foreign policy record than Clinton , Trump and Biden
- The Iraqi government refused to let US military forces stay unless Iraqi courts had the ability to prosecute American soldiers for any crimes they may have committed. Would you have supported that?
- Libya was a disaster for NATO in general, yes, and Obama deserves his share of blame.
- Syria was overall a no-win situation, though the “red line” bs was foolish and the lack of follow through devastating in terms of American “credibility” (God how I hate that word in this context). But the Saudis and Qataris can’t be trusted to not fund Islamist militias especially against an Iranian ally (Assad), and Obama was too reliant on the CIA and covert action (drones being a notable and controversial case), though every President since the CIA was created has been guilty of that so not a uniquely Obama failure.
- Agree re: ISIS, more or less
- Easy to say that Obama was weak on Putin with hindsight, but the dumbest part of the “Reset” is the idea that the younger “Westernized” (nowadays, pathetic alcoholic Kremlin troll) Dmitri Medvedev was a real Russian President.
- Not sure what he should have done there. The US has an appalling history in terms of intervention in Latin America, I’m not sure we have much credibility (there’s thatd again) there.
I never claimed Obama’s foreign policy was actually good overall; it’s more an indictment of recent Presidents being horrible there. I suspect that a lot of that is baked into the Presidency as the head of the post-WWII Nuclear Age national security state and the massive expansion of the executive branch in general in terms of the military, intelligence, and so forth, and America’s superpower role. Any individual with that amount of power is incredibly dangerous by definition.
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