Obama Forgets the World

Big appearance for Barack Obama: On Tuesday, the president is addressing Americans in his State of the Union address. Foreign policy, however, will only be mentioned in passing — a missed opportunity.

Usually, during their second term, American presidents like to devote themselves to foreign policy. While being regarded as a political lame duck at home, one likes to refocus his primary field of activities on matters overseas, but not Barack Obama. At this point, the 44th president breaks with his predecessors’ traditions.

And that is not good news for the rest of the world.

One will be able to watch this tonight, when Obama presents his annual State of the Union address to Congress and approximately 30 million Americans in front of their TVs.

The keynote of the president’s appearance is fighting growing inequality: higher taxes on capital gains, allowances for families – he will ask for all of that, even though there won’t ever be a majority for that in Congress. Yes, in America this is without a doubt an important debate, as the economic upturn does not reach a lot of people; thus more redistribution is needed.

But the counterpoint to striving for a better, more righteous America is striving for a better, more righteous world, and that is currently missing in Obama’s agenda. Some people in Europe might say, even better, the Americans should keep their noses out of it! But if the Americans stay out of it, usually not much happens.

To be quite clear, this is not about wars in the Bush-Cheney way that violate international law. The old Bush warriors tend to make self-righteous appearances again; however, these people shouldn’t be on talk shows, but rather in The Hague. Obama’s initial reaction toward this legacy of over-reach was smart and correct: gradual retrenchment politics and more internal cooperation. The idea is that America’s interventions in the Muslim world never really helped to improve the situation as a whole. Obama once said there was no al-Qaida in Iraq before Bush.

But Obama discredited his own retrenchment politics because he partly interpreted them as staying-out-it politics. For the longest time, the U.S. did not provide any weapons to the moderate Syrian rebels; Obama merely watched the rise of the Islamic State despite a large number of warnings. As of today, despite several air strikes, there is no obvious, coherent Syria strategy to be found. And why is it that the president did not travel to Paris to participate in the silent march for Charlie Hebdo? Why doesn’t the White House call terrorism “terrorism,” but “violent extremism?” Clear statements, clear strategy, that’s what the State of the Union Address should be for.

Obama is currently working on his legacy as a domestic politician, but he should not be forgetting his foreign policy legacy either. Otherwise, once he moves out of the White House, there won’t be much left of his retrenchment politics, regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat moves in. Very quickly steps could be taken in the opposite direction, and we would end up seeing more U.S. intervention than we prefer.