I'm not getting paid $0.10/word to review Mr Obama's foreign policy, so rather than write a long exegesis, I'll confine myself to some of the fundamentals.
Certainly, it's worth observing from the beginning that Mr Obama inherited a complicated diplomatic landscape from Mr Bush; then again, there are few presidents that didn't have complicated situations; it's pretty much part of the job description. Mr Bush inherited a hot-air economy and a security situation that would ultimately dump 9/11 on his watch: were those Mr Clinton's "fault"? At a certain point, grownups understand that you can't keep blaming your parents for things that happen. You can only cope, or not. I'd argue that the bulk of Mr Obama's foreign-policy has been the latter.
First, the article tries to squeeze a lot of mileage out of vapid theorizing about his retrenchment and advancing the (classical) liberal world order. This is a canard; foreign policy is about actions, results, and consequences. Only intellectuals (and the sort of people who write long-drown-out apologias in erudite policy publications) have the luxury of steering their course by such ephemeralities. In fact, Mr Obama's Wilsonian approach has caused at least as durable and persistent damage to the US's long-term global relationships as anything Mr Bush's blunders may have caused.
Let's review:
- the "pivot" to Asia:
has never actually happened, and frankly won't in the lame-duck years of the Obama Administration. In fact, we have as revanchist and aggressive a China as ever, whose actions in the South China Sea have gone largely unchallenged, and a network of Asian allies that seriously doubting the US's willingness to defend our previous policy assurances. I'm not saying that confrontation with China would be at all productive, but leaving allies to swing unsupported in the wind forces them to recalculate the value of distant allegiances when a restive, active, assertive China is on their border. This is the WORST-possible outcome for the long term security of the US in perhaps the MOST IMPORTANT region of the world for the next century. The US's economic and cultural dominance rests essentially on these proxies in the region, having them doubt the US commitment now is terrible.
- South Asia:
the Obama administration's strengthening of ties to India is about the only foreign policy success I can point to. This was a positive move, at least checking if not outright calling the bluff on Pakistan's troublesome usefulness in the region. I'm not convinced that India is a relevant counterweight to China - despite being neighbors, their spheres of interest don't really overlap - but coopting India out of a potential Russian courtship is at least militarily useful as it ever was during the Great Game.
Afghanistan is a mess, caused by a desperate flight of US involvement (if not yet quite all our military, as was promised). I'm not saying that Afghanistan HAD a "winning endgame", but the festering decrepitude of our involvement there has solved nothing, and likely made it worse. Mr Obama's campaign platitudes - as usual - were insufficient to address the subtleties of the context. No progress, likely worse.
Iran...ah, Iran. Mr Obama's desperate and recklass search for his legacy likely has provided breathing space to a regime entirely inimical to every American strategic goal in the region, alienated what few friends we had left, will dump at least $50 billion into Iran's extenisive terror-network, and to a group of cultures in which image and stature are everything, we have 'blinked'. Far worse than the feeble flounderings of Mogadishu (which arguably invited Saddam's adventurism into Kuwait), the US has been shown to be spineless and craven, ceding regional dominance to whomever can take it and inviting the Gulf States to decide that the US is no longer the security guarantor it once was. The result will almost certainly be a conflict between Iran's millions of people and Saudis billions of dollars to fill the vacuum of the now-absent superpower.
- The Mideast:
Israel: Mr Obama's obvious dislike of Israel has recently been overshadowed by the personal, mutual animosity he shares with Mr Netanhyahu. The sole bulwark of Western liberal humanism in the region has not been an uncomplicated friendship, but it's been a durable one and will hopefully survive Mr Obama's tenure (and his deliberate efforts to harm it). The US has, in essence, foregone the partnership meaning that Israel *must* now regard US interests with even less weight when choosing their course of action. I cannot imagine that will be uniformly beneficial for US policy, as the Arabs still generally believe that Israel is a proxy for the US, no matter what they do.
Arab states: Mr Obama's vaunted idealims have utterly failed in the face of the Arab Spring. His dithering intellectualism and relativism unmanned him in the moment when the US could have taken a role of moral leadership. Either you lead morally, or pragmatically, but you can't do both and Mr Obama has done neither, leaving the popular movements to fester into the worst sort of internecine throat-slitting, where the most organized and brutal factions are winning, ie fundamentalist fronts whose success is anathema to long-term US interests in practical terms AND in moral ones. By failing to lead, he's failed to secure either.
ISIS: I wonder if Mr Obama yet takes the "JV team" seriously? Its astonishing that a US president can't even manage to take a stance or formulate clear policy against a medievalist, barbaric, brutal band of cartoon thugs that EVERYONE agrees needs to be eliminated? Seriously, it's the only subject in US politics today that has NO domestic SIDE-BIAS: left, right, Democrats, Republicans, everyone agrees these guys are bloodthirsty animals...yet the US president, with the greatest bully-pulpit in history, can't even summon leadership on this issue. Here is the perfect contrast between Mr Bush's approach, and Mr Obama's: yes, sometimes presidents can make bad choices, but failing to make any choice is a choice of its own, and often the consequences are even worse. This is Syria and ISIS in a nutshell. Conceding 'sphere of influence' to Russia in Syria was a quasi-19th-century move that even Mr Obama didn't seem like he believed he was doing, but was drowned out by the palpable sigh of relief ("At least it's someone else's problem now...") from the White House. That's worked out great for the people of the region.
- Europe:
Russia was famously dismissed in a well-documented chat between Mr Obama and Mr Romney pre-election, Mr Obama has had to eat his words on this one, too. Putin is an old-school thug of the KGB era, who personally witnessed the bankruptcy of Soviet power in East Germany. He is utterly unafraid of the mealy-mouthed pronouncements from Washington, and in this lies the most dangerous threat of actual war: a Russian underestimation of US intentions in Europe and specifically in regard to the Baltic states protected by NATO Article 7. We absolutely screwed Poland (who spent substantial political capital to host the ABM systems), and have now essentially "checked out" of any influence on the Ukrainian issue (that I believe we substantially created, if the arrogant US State Dept phone calls are to be believed). We could have brokered a deal between Ukraine and Russia, playing a critical part in appeasing historical Russian paranoia and securing markets and peoples in Ukraine, but I suspect we got greedy and were naive about how Russia would react about the threat of NATO and the EU right on their border. This shows a staggering disregard for history, culture, and a lack of empathy that beggars the imagination. Now, Ms. Merkel speaks with a far louder, more credible voice in Moscow than Mr Obama.
Further, we've routinely alienated long-time European allies, again dismissing multi-decade currents of history in favor of a sort of intellectual conceit from Washington about 'how the world works'.
No, while Mr Bush made plenty of policy errors, Mr Obama's tenure has been worse, in the long picture.
