Obama Can Still Take Action

Barack Obama has gone through his final electoral ordeal. The Democrats lost control of the Senate during Tuesday’s midterm legislative elections. Without a majority in the upper chamber, the president may become paralyzed during the last two years of his mandate — on the domestic front at least. He can still take action on foreign policy.

The presidential cycle in American politics is well-known. A president re-elected to a second term is immediately seen as a lame duck by the political class, and the campaign to succeed him begins right away. On top of that, if his party loses its majority in both houses of Congress, the way Barack Obama has, he is considered dead and buried.

At this same stage during their respective presidencies, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush read their obituaries in the papers after their party was defeated. It was a bit hasty; each of them was very active on the international scene.

Within two years, Reagan rekindled the detente with the Soviet Union by signing, along with Gorbachev, an important treaty on the elimination of nuclear missiles in Europe, and by laying the foundation for an intense political dialogue that certainly hastened the end of the Communist era. Bill Clinton involved NATO in a military operation against Serbia to protect Kosovo and laid the groundwork for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord that is still used as the basis of talks to this day. George W. Bush contributed billions of dollars to fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, mainly in Africa, with the help of Bono, one of his harshest critics.

Barack Obama could also mark his presidency using international initiatives. In a few days, Americans, Russians, Europeans and Iranians will be meeting to finalize an accord that could neutralize Iran’s nuclear military program. A Russian proposal was submitted to these parties, who considered it encouraging and constructive. An accord with Iran would open a new page in the America’s relations in that part of the world.

The president could also resume Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, even though he seems to have lost the trust of both Israel and Palestine regarding this issue. Both parties have the Clinton plan in hand; do they really want to wait for a new administration in January 2017, while U.S. efforts are concentrated on the situation in the rest of the Middle East?

Finally, on the economic front, Obama has two years to complete negotiations for an agreement between Europe and the U.S. that will create the world’s largest free trade zone. The agreement, along with the Canada-Europe accord signed earlier this year, will allow the North American/European bloc to control one-third of international trade and half of the world’s gross domestic product.

The president will have to face a new Congress, which will oppose the first two of these three agendas. In the meantime, Obama can win majority support by taking advantage of divisions within the Republican Party and shifts in public opinion. Several Republican senators, including the influential Rand Paul, and a segment of the population are simply tired of the military disasters of post-2001 U.S. foreign policy and are demanding that the government focus on domestic problems again. It is in the Republicans’ best interest to listen, or Tuesday’s victory could turn into a disaster during the 2016 presidential campaign.

With the midterm elections now behind him, Obama is a free man. He can still write the history of his presidency.