Obama’s World

The global legacy of the [outgoing] United States president is not exactly pretty.

If a legacy exists of Barack Obama’s foreign policy (which in the case of the U.S. president really means a global legacy), it is one of a troubled and violent world. Taking into account all the positives and negatives, there is no doubt that Obama leaves a world much more violent than the one he found when he arrived at the White House in 2009.

Obama was quickly made recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for the simple fact of not being George W. Bush. After eight years of confrontational Washington politics, unilateralism, “preventative wars,” and downplaying the U.N., the conciliatory spirit of the new president, his promise to end Bush’s wars, great charisma, intellectual lucidity, and extraordinary oratory ability excited the world. World peace would finally be an achievable dream. The Nobel was a type of cash on delivery, a blank check in exchange for peace.

That was not the case. Obama could have ended the war in Iraq like he promised and greatly suppressed the intervention in Afghanistan. But he embarked on an improbable “Arab Spring” that took him into a brutal intervention in Libya and later a prolonged indirect intervention in Syria, which went on for more than five years. Those two conflicts created a massive humanitarian disaster that the world still endures today, with more than 60 million displaced people, more than 20 million refugees pushing the borders of an overwhelmed Europe, and out of control terrorism thrashing every capital from the Levant to the Azores. In his second term, the U.S. president hoped to push what is known as “the Obama Doctrine,” which according to him was a combination of multilateralism, international cooperation and combating terrorism. Here word choice is important: with “multilateralism,” Obama wanted to make a clear distinction from the unilateralism of the Bush years, the same with international “cooperation.” The Obama Doctrine wouldn’t leave out his European allies or confront France’s power, as had happened with the “Bush Doctrine,” which had weakened Bush’s talons. The neo-conservatives were ready to survive militarily in the world, in particular in the Middle East, with an alliance with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchs.

That was the wording. In action, however, the Obama Doctrine wasn’t much different than the Bush Doctrine. He maintained an alliance with the ill-fated king of Saudi Arabia, a never-ending promoter and financier of Salafist terrorism that created the Islamic State group. He sustained the terrible idea of “regime change,” which would overthrow (and they overthrew) regimes hostile to Washington politics in order to put in place allied governments. He blindly supported the strategies of the CIA in the Middle East, the intelligence community and the falcons that operated in different departments in order to arm and finance extremists and terrorists that fought against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria under the patina of “moderate rebels,” many of who filled the ranks of the Islamic State group with weapons and experience. What is worse, according to his own secretary of state, John Kerry, in a recently leaked audio, they intended, in a preposterous and absolutely blunt manner, to take advantage of the Islamic State group’s growth to force Assad to negotiate, while aiding the terrorists that held siege over the city of Aleppo.

All of these are unjustifiable policies of the Obama administration. As a matter of fact, he didn’t achieve, as he claimed, stopping China’s advancement in the Pacific, or winning the Asian markets in that region of the world. The “pivot to Asia” policy did not earn a greater influence for Washington in the region, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership is still drifting overseas. Nor could he stop the Russian expansion, losing to Vladimir Putin in Crimea, Syria, Eastern Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe where the Russian leader could open holes for his gas, petroleum and, above all, his political influence.

At the root of its prevalence and superiority in Syria, Russia could establish an axis in the Middle East — Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, Moscow — that, because of Washington’s helplessness and the CIA’s strategy to help the struggle against Turkish President Erdogan at the middle of the year, ended up including Ankara.

Obama remained with Riyadh and the other Gulf kings, his influence very divided now that the nuclear pact with Iran did less and less to separate Tehran from the pillar in Moscow. Then, the unthinkable: The primary and traditional ally to the U.S., Israel, stopped direct conversation with Moscow until then-candidate Donald Trump expressed suspicions about the Obama administration’s ambiguous stance regarding the two-state solution promoted in the U.N. Security Council, where a few days before Washington had abstained from vetoing a condemnation against Israel for settling in occupied territories.

If anything, Obama’s only success in foreign policy has been to re-establish relations with Cuba, but even that is teetering now with the uncertainty of what President-elect Trump will do once he takes over. Even though it is probable that the tycoon is only looking for greater concessions from the Cuban regime, in that way, it will speed up a little the arrival of liberties to the island, which is the main purpose behind the idea of the thawing with Cuba.

Obama leaves many beautiful narratives about international politics, democracy and humanism, but he didn’t always practice that last one so well. And the world that he leaves is certainly not more democratic, or safer or more human.