Ok, this is going to get downvoted like hell but here is a thought experiment from a European...
Not a bad record on Foreign Policy for Obama. (Ok, I am being very very generous in some areas and will let someone else lay out the opposite case but still...)
-Improve the US image abroad after Bush
-Get out of major boots on the ground in Iraq
-Get out of major boots on the ground in Afghanistan
-Kill Bin Laden
-Reduce the operational capability of Al-Qaeda core members
-Avoid getting dragged into boots on the ground in Syria / get chemical weapons out
-Overthrow Gaddafi
-Re-open Cuban Embassy
-Contain ISIS
-Re-focus on China
-Environment deal with China
-Get cooperation from the Pakistan ISI vs Taliban
-Improve long-term relations with India
-Gain trust of Asian states (like Vietnam) who are threatened by China
-Re-balance relationship with Israel
-Weaken Russia slowly (after getting out manoeuvred in Ukraine by Putin)
-Reduce dependance on Saudi Arabia
-Reduce dependence on foreign oil/gas
-Reduce the slow march of Chinese power in Africa (esp: Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa)
-Shore up NATO vs Russia
-Reduce the influence on Venezuela in South America
-Get a deal on Iranian nuclear program
-Lay the ground work for rebuilding the US military after 15 years of insurgent warfare
-Patch things up (behind the scenes) with Brazil and Germany after Snowden
-Rebuild economy (slowly) after the Bush mess and recession
(EDIT: Just to point out, I don't see these as exactly black and white issues and am well aware of the nuance. Just trying to give one side of an argument so others can do the rest. Even a portion of the stuff in there is a pretty decent record for a President.)
History will show Obama as one of the greatest US presidents in modern history. Sure he is not perfect, the drone strikes and the TPP come to mind, but he is just about as good a president can be in America (without being assassinated).
I'll just simply say the opposite. History will show Obama as one of the worst US presidents in the entire history of the United States. Sure, he did a few things well, his "Beer Summit" comes to mind, but he is just about as good a president can be in the United States, when propped-up by awe-struck media.
Obama is letting thousands of Ukranians get slaughtered by Russian forces, almost all civilians and cut one of the worst deals with a hostile power in recent memory, more or less guaranteeing an Israeli-Iran war in the next 5-10 years as the Iranians finally get nukes. His Iraq pullout failed considering Iraq has lost most of its territory to a ragtag bunch of nuts. Half the things on your list make no sense like "Re-focus on China?" What? The Chinese are launching their military and stealing disputed islands and putting airstrips and AA on them to control critical trade routes and denying fly-over rights to other nations.
>Re-balance relationship with Israel
What? We just gave Netanyahu a moral right to attack Iran as its clear they will get a nuke soon. The same way Israel had to stop Assad's nuclear program in Syria- via bombing (Operation Orchard).
>Overthrow Gaddafi
The brave people on Libya did that, NATO may has hastened his demise, but no one went after Gaddafi from the west; this was a civil war. Meanwhile Syria's al-Assad has 300,000 civilian deaths under his belt and we're all pretending this isn't happening because Obama won't confront Iran or Russia on this.
>Weaken Russia slowly
Russia is trivially annexing its neighbors and these "show sanctions" are doing next to nothing. Russia's economic slowdown was a long time coming and these sanctions haven't changed a thing. Putin is trivially murdering children in Ukraine and laughing about it on state television. "Oh that's not us" wink-wink.
>Shore up NATO vs Russia
NATO spending is still in the toilet, what are we shoring up exactly? Stretching out the USG because most of the NATO countries don't want to actually build a military? A few tanks in Estonia?
>Reduce dependence on foreign oil/gas
Destroying our environment via fracking shouldn't be applauded.
Look, Obama is a pretty good domestic president and a bad foreign policy president. Lots of innocents have died on his watch and many of those conflicts and deaths were 100% preventable. Its incredible how bad his foreign policy credentials are. I wish this wasn't true. I voted for him, twice, and am just shocked at how he is unable to compete on the world stage. He is routinely outsmarted and outfoxed by most nations.
Lastly, Cuba hasn't made any human rights reforms, is not committed to stopping the torture and jailing of political dissidents, etc but somehow magically gets normalization overnight via backroom deals and secret agreements? This happens out of the blue? Gee, I think Putin made a deal to Cuba and Cuba called Washington and said "You guys or Putin, pick now" and Obama folded because he's running scared from Putin on several fronts and doesn't need him in his backyard.
As a European in NATO, I presume, this should give you pause. Having the superpower that protects you running scared over paper tigers like Putin, Khamenei, Jinping, and the Castros should be worrying, not celebrated. I suspect Obama's focus on having a "legacy" means wrapping up issues as his time is running out. Shame that a lot of these decisions are poorly thought out and will come at a real human cost. A lot of his "landmark" foreign policy is just pushing conflicts onto the next president.
Incorrect. The founder of ISIS / Daesh was a former Baathist general under Sadaam in Iraq. He saw the conflict in Syria as a way to gain leverage, but it most definitely did not bring it to us. He was already planning to build ISIS, and just simply leaped at the opportunity when the Syrian civil war began.
> Have us not forget that the Syrian conflict brought us ISIS/ISAL who subsequently invaded Iraq and still hold land there today.
The entity now calling itself simply "the Islamic State" and claiming a global caliphate -- formerly styled Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, before that the separate Islamic State in Iraq and al-Nusra front in Syria, before that just the Islamic State in Iraq (al-Nusra front was an offshoot which later reunited), earlier still (before severing the ties it formed in 2004 with al-Qaeda) al-Qaeda in Iraq, and originally Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad -- has been around since 1999.
Certainly, the US war with al-Qaeda, the US invasion of Iraq, and the Syrian civil war each provided opportunities which it exploited in its growth, but none of them -- and certainly not the last of those -- can be credited with having "brought us" the organization.
And the Islamic State in Iraq held territory in Iraq and was fighting a campaign against the government there before it sent an offshoot group to Syria, it wasn't something formed in Syria which later invaded Iraq.
You are being generous. Too generous. These are very, very high-spin bullet points and contrary analysis is easy. Let's try a few examples!
(Disclaimer. These opinions are for sample use and being contrarian only. Seriously advancing these opinions is a legitimate thing, but the purpose of this post is not to advance them. They will not be defended if you reply.)
Reduce dependence on foreign oil and gas? He's been against all sorts of oil projects and fracking from the moment he took office (although if you want to be pedantic Keystone is technically foreign oil). The mess around Gaddafi and Syria, and the troop withdrawals in Iraq, helped gave rise to ISIS/ISIL to begin with, and they're far from contained yet. NATO vs Russia has looked less like "shoring up" NATO and slowly weakening Putin than just letting Putin having his way with Ukraine (or "the Ukraine", if you're Putin). "Re-balance relation with Israel" could equally be construed as propping up Hamas and giving his blessing for Iran to build nuclear weapons. Re-establishing relations with Cuba is re-establishing relations with a totalitarian state and a bad idea! The environment deal will accomplish nothing in the end.
(end sample opinions)
I think there's a few too many caveats here, and that at best a few decades out we'll be looking at the Obama foreign-policy record as decidedly mixed.
Fracking is at an all-time high and US oil production is higher than it's been for a while. Whether you are happy with oil prices or not, environmentalists will tell you it's blatantly dishonest to say "He's been against all sorts of oil projects and fracking."
Most of this is US foreign policy which is not specific to Obama, it just represents continuity from Bush.
It was our entry into Iraq which created enemies like ISIS, not the withdrawal from Iraq. Iraq was never going to be the 51st state.
I agree that Putin has been allowed to do whatever he wants, but the clear start of that was the Georgia fiasco under Bush, and the unspoken alternatives are extremely unpleasant. I hate what happened to Ukraine, but I wouldn't personally die to fight Putin about Ukraine, so why should I volunteer our troops to die for that? Was that ever really an option?
There is plenty of room to disagree about whether we should have been making deals with Iran and Cuba.
If someone has an honestly favorable impression, it doesn't mean they have "very high-spin bullet points" but the arguments you've advanced are clearly dishonest.
If anything, Obama has been almost entirely, intentionally neutral on fracking. He knows how important it has been to delivering a massive new source of domestic energy supply, including enabling natural gas to overtake coal.
He has cleared not sicced his EPA on oil & gas companies heavily reliant on fracking, when he easily could have made their lives far more difficult.
I think that's the only thing Obama has done good on since the Solyndra snafu. It's best the govt just foster a general policy of funding all domestic energy interests (fusion, solar, wind, oil, and etc) than just picking one clear winner. Stuff like grants for researching a new method of oil extraction is good, but giving a loan to an oil company to open a production quality well is not.
I doubt fracking will last if the techniques involved still require oil being near $100/barrel. That seems to be the sweet spot for starting up a new well. Plus, it seems there's more resistance to fracking in other states (outside of ND) since there's evidence of water pollution due to improper uses (Oklahoma has had some of its ground water sources polluted due to mismanagement and general idiocy). I doubt we'll see fracking last more than a decade in this country at this rate if companies can't follow the basic regulations on the matter, too.
> we'll be looking at the Obama foreign-policy record as decidedly mixed.
Except his foreign policy doesn't exist in a vacuum and it's entirely subjective. Compared to Bush's 'big stick' foreign policy, for someone who doesn't live in the States, Obama truly is "change" personified.
I was in Japan when Obama was elected for his first term and there were people literally in tears at finding out that Obama had won. You'll see a couple news reports and interviews on youtube where you'll see them saying "Yeah, we're happy he won." then they would repeat his slogans "Change!" and "Yes we can!". But I had a chance to speak to a bunch of those people due to the nature of my job and after some rather in-depth questions, they weren't in tears because Obama had won, they were in tears because they were happy McCain/Palin lost. They didn't want another "crazy" republican in office. It was actually a bit shocking to learn that people abroad follow our politics more closely than a good many of our citizens. And it was interesting to see that they consider democrats the level headed bunch, and the more 'peaceful' party.
So I don't think they're a fan of Obama personally (though I'm sure some are), I think it's the fact that they prefer democratic foreign policy over republican foreign policy in general, and see republicans as war mongering neocons.
>And it was interesting to see that they consider democrats the level headed bunch, and the more 'peaceful' party.
Well why wouldn't they? Just because Republicans run as the party of mature, responsible individuals who can see how liberal idealism sounds nice but will ultimately founder against the hard rocks of the real world doesn't mean that their real-world policy record bears out their propaganda. In fact, the Democrats are basically what most of the world considers responsible conservatives (eg: mature, responsible people who can see how idealism sounds nice but ultimately founders, and thus how stability is preferable above all else). The Republicans are considered far-right nationalists, warmongers, and religious crazies.
>So I don't think they're a fan of Obama personally (though I'm sure some are), I think it's the fact that they prefer democratic foreign policy over republican foreign policy in general, and see republicans as war mongering neocons.
Again: well yeah. Nixon went to China. Today's Republican foreign-policy establishment spent a lot of effort claiming that if we don't go to war with Iran, that if we in fact use diplomacy without invading, we're effectively Neville Chamberlain. They said exactly the same thing about Iraq, and look how that turned out.
If you want a mature, responsible conservative, vote for the Democrats. If you want an actual left, vote Socialist. The Republicans have been far-right since Bush II.
You wrote, "the troop withdrawals in Iraq, helped gave rise to ISIS/ISIL to begin with,"
The troop withdrawal in Iraq was caused by an agreement signed between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government. The Obama administration tried (some say not hard enough, but it cannot be denied that it tried) to extend the deadline negotiated by the Bush administration, but the Iraqi government denied the extension.
If this is an example of "contrary analysis" you would have been better off sitting on your hands.
He didn't do this. He was just president in an ongoing operation that started a long time ago. He didn't pass any particular policies or make any changes that led to this.
>-Contain ISIS
ISIS started under him and it's not contained.
>-Get a deal on Iranian nuclear program
Also 10 years in the making and he made some significant concessions to Iran that made the deal almost useless. The US has to give nearly a months warning before it's allowed to check to see if they are breaking the rules.
As if the president dons his cowboy hat, gets into an Apache Rambo-style and hunts terrorists, right?
I don't understand how any rational person would have so much difficulty giving him credit for the operation; it was his call! He made the call to get Bin Laden, just like Bush made the call to let him and other top Taliban escape (see "Kunduz Airlift": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_airlift )
The presently-accepted record demonstrates you are incorrect in saying Obama "was just president in an ongoing operation" to get bin Laden.
First, it has been reported over and over that locating bin Laden was a priority of the Obama administration. Obama announced this in presidential debates, and redirected intelligence resources to this end after he was elected (directing DCI Panetta on June 2 2009 to find a detailed operational plan for locating bin Laden, among other things).
Second: Obama personally accepted responsibility for conducting the raid. We all know how well that went for Jimmy Carter, so that was a real risk.
Third, and perhaps more controversial: It was reported at the time of the raid that Obama's concerns about getting the team out resulted in changing the plan in a key way (e.g., http://swampland.time.com/2011/05/03/obama-pushed-for-fight-...). This is what we have been told, but only time will tell.
The seeds for ISIS were sown when Bush & Rumsfeld disbanded the Iraqi Army. What else did they think would happen? Over 300,000 trained soldiers; many of them veterans of the Iran-Iraq war; suddenly jobless and without benefits. Their only marketable skill is how to shoot!
Most of those things Obama wasn't specifically responsible for, and many of them he had absolutely nothing to do with (eg oil/gas boom). Obama's greatest contribution overall was the lack of negatives: the US economy will self-heal so long as you stop stabbing it.
That said, here are his most important accomplishments:
- Standing down, mostly, as states begin legalizing pot and start to experiment with decriminalization of drugs
- Bringing focus to the US prison system, and obscene mandatory sentencing laws (working with the Koch brothers to boot)
- Not trying to block marriage equality
- Bringing some attention to asset seizures, removing some incentives for the police to steal
- Avoiding any further large scale wars, the US simply can't afford it; it's worth noting he wanted a much larger scale war effort against Syria, and found very little support for it, so he back-tracked
- Iran deal, avoiding the war that some would have liked to see; such a war would have been unimaginably destructive to the US economy, far worse than Iraq
- The strong dollar and oversupply of oil damaged Russia. The end of QE caused the dollar to rise. Obama's contribution was to not do anything stupid that might cause oil to soar, or the dollar to plunge
- Obamacare / ACA. His involvement was very limited, but he did champion it from the beginning. Not sure on this one though, it'll either end up being viewed as a giant debacle cost wise, or the program that marked the start of universal healthcare in the US and bending down the cost curve in healthcare via top-down government mandate.
FWIW, I don't think Obama has been any more effective in foreign policy than Bush. Obama's biggest failure is that he makes very big, lofty rhetoric, yet is unable to fulfill that rhetoric with effective action. Examples:
* Nuclear disarmament (you know, what he ostensibly got his Nobel peace prize for)... yeah, that's firmly dead in the water.
* The big Muslim reconcilation (his big speech in Cairo in 2009)... post-Arab Spring, there's a lot of disillusionment in the Muslim world considering that actions haven't matched up to those words.
* Syria's chemical weapons, wherein Obama threatened heavy repercussions should Syria use them in its civil war. Said heavy repercussions turned out to be merely exporting those weapons and not even anything so hefty as extracting an admission of guilt or instituting a trial in the ICC or ICJ over their use.
* The Asian pivot, whose biggest practical effect has been to cause allies to question America's willingness to uphold its own commitments.
* The Russian "reset"... okay, this one is Putin's fault. :-)
You can argue that, in many respects, Obama is/was constrained by public opinion, but that's just the mark of the most common failure of politicians: the politicians whose names echo through history are not the ones who follow public opinion, but the ones who lead it.
Great rhetoric with no action is still way better than terrible rhetoric backed up by force. Bush's foreign policy was a complete disaster. Accomplishing nothing would be a tremendous improvement by comparison.
The problem, though, is that some of Obama's accomplishments aren't "accomplishing nothing"--they're accomplishing bad things. In particular, the "red line" in Syria and the (effective) capitulation to Russia over Ukraine feel eerily similar to the run-up to WWII, where the Allies capitulated to Hitler rather than go to war and ended up going to war when Germany was a lot stronger and harder to counter. In contrast, the situation of the Cuban missile crisis was resolved in large part by JFK refusing to let the USSR declare a new normal.
As a thought experiment, do you think that Putin would have attempted to dislodge Crimea from Ukraine or Assad would have used chemical weapons had Bush still been in power? If you're tempted to answer "no," then that is a success of Bush's foreign policy. But if words will never be backed up with power, then words are just words and can be safely ignored.
Putin didn't have a problem invading Georgia on Bush's watch. North Korea didn't have any problem letting off nukes either. Saddam didn't have any problem letting of chemical weapons during Reagan.
Georgia fucked up by invading thier breakaway regions. Putin had massive justification to invade/defend, unlike in Ukraine which was an opportunistic land grab
I agree that some of Obama's accomplishments were negative.
But none of them came anywhere close to the debacle of Iraq. The "red line" nonsense was definitely bad. Making big declarations and ignoring them is not smart. But it's not even on the same level as invading a sovereign nation, getting a million or so people killed, and wasting an unimaginable amount of money for no reason.
I don't know that Ukraine qualifies as bad US foreign policy. We don't really have a responsibility there. (Contrary to the popular rhetoric on the internet, the treaty under which Ukraine gave up their Soviet-era nuclear weapons merely required the signatories to respect Ukrainian sovereignty, not guarantee it. Russia is violating that treaty, but the treaty does not require the US to assist.)
Would Assad have used chemical weapons had Bush still been in power? Maybe not. But seeing as how Bush is responsible for the whole regional mess in the first place, that hardly seems like plus on his side.
Would Russia have taken Crimea if Bush were still in power? I don't see why not. Not only did Bush waste a ton of lives and money, he also set the precedent that he would ignore any country capable of actually resisting. He invaded Iraq for imaginary WMDs, but ignored North Korea's actual WMDs even though they were a part of the "axis of evil." Russia has even more WMDs than North Korea and I imagine they would be confident that nothing would be done.
That's an easy thought experiment, because it doesn't matter which president you ask that supposition about - neither of those things would not have been avoided due to a saber rattling president.
After more than a decade of the US being involved in a mistaken invasion, we, as a nation, are war weary. Without a serious issue within our borders, the US simply will not do it. Every analyst, both in the US and outside, knows that.
I personally think the "red line" thing was mostly good PR for the anti-Obama politicians. I don't think it had any real impact on our foreign policy. The words the President used weren't, as so often claimed, "If Syria uses chemical weapons, we'll invade". He said, quoting him from his comments on Aug. 20, 2012; "We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation." By the time we knew that chemical weapons had been used, many other things had also happened, too, so the "equation" had a lot of new variables.
Assuming it doesn't fail, but I feel that the Iran deal with Obamacare, and the NSA leaks will be the things we will associate with Obama in the future. That and that he's black.
Even if you're extremely charitable in all of those cases President Obama also started and defined the rules for what is essentially illegal drone warfare against citizens, not enemy combatants, in other countries. That's not even counting the pandora's box he opened by killing American citizens by drone without any sort of due process. To me those two simple facts far outweigh anything else he's done, both domestically and internationally.
If you had told me in 2008 that Obama would be signing extrajudicial death-by-drone warrants every Tuesday morning I would have laughed. But, here we are...
And if you go back in time to the Vietnam era, and tell anyone that in the 21st Century, the president would personally authorize the deaths of individual militants when prosecuting a war, they would think we now live in a liberal utopia.
I find this neither complete nor accurate but it's good to see a list like this. Thanks for doing the legwork.
Don't forget the Japan mutual defense deal, the upcoming Korea unification and all the other hundred things in the Asia Pacific.
Be careful about many of these things - the way you present them needs to be pretty careful. The goal in the Asia-Pacific (TPP included) is to contain China with a balance of power in their region. This includes Australia, Philippines, Japan of course, Guam, and Singapore, Vietnam, India, Thailand, Northern Mariana Islands, etc. Ukraine was being purposefully Westernized (Project UNITER) for inclusion into the EU and Russia is the goal after Ukraine. It is against the backdrop of NATO, EU and in general Western liberal expansion that Russia solidified its position in Crimea. In other words many of the things you list here can be seen as policy failures or at least haven't played themselves out (Saudi Arabia and Israel with Iranian nuclear deal, etc). We don't know whether this will actually prevent Israel from invading Iran yet.
Yadda yadda.
Anyway, thanks for compiling a list. It's hard to follow American domestic politics without understanding American Foreign policy and Geostrategy. So it's good to see information and dialogue posted here.
During the White House press briefing the WH spokesperson mentioned that normalizing ties was being done for international strategic purposes (and of course, Cuba was blacklisted for similar and for political reasons - not because they had anything to do with terrorism). I don't actually know what they mean by this. Do you have some idea of what strategic investment/partnership is being made?
Oh yeah. That's totally happening. The Sunshine Policy was ended some time ago. President Geun-hye called for international support for the unification at the UN. SK, the US and Japan have joint plans for the destabilization of the regime and other contingencies, US foreign policy thinktanks are devising plans for the event (http://www.brookings.edu/research/presentations/2015/01/20-k...), SK and US are in talks with China about getting their support, interception capabilities have been moved out to the Korean peninsula, anthrax was sent from the DoD to a bunch of labs in the Asia Pacific (North Korea is afraid of being framed - came to the UN with a complaint and offered to open up inspection of its laboratories to the international community).
Uh, a bunch of other associated facts. But yeah, give it a pretty short couple of years and you're going to see this happen.
You had me until you started claiming that the US was going to be involved in destabilizing NK; that seemed pretty hard to believe. Then you brought up anthrax and then I knew you were just pulling our collective legs.
Well they are trying to destabilize the regime - I didn't provide data on that. (Would you like some?)
The anthrax thing is reporting facts. I didn't say that the US IS organizing this. I didn't say NK was RIGHT about their worries. What I did say about anthrax is quite true.
We'll have to see. I've read that until after JFK was assassinated, he wasn't really viewed as a good president as he is now. I am biased in thinking that he will be remembered well, but we'll have to wait and see.
This is an event that occurred, yes. I don't see the point of it being on HN though -- the guidelines suggest staying away from mainstream news, and as already shown in the first comment here, there's basically no chance of a worthwhile discussion coming out of it.
I think it's well worth including on HN. It's a pretty momentous occasion, as the Cold War is arguably the defining geopolitical phenomena of the last half of the 20th century. Sure, some of the commentary is gonna suck, but people vote accordingly and then we move on. But I'm glad we're at least giving discussion a chance.
Can we spin this to discuss what influence it would have on Cuba's IT growth?
Now that there is an embassy there U.S tech companies might be more inclined to invest there.
Hopefully bring down the price of internet in the country. From what I have heard from activists on the ground it can often be hundreds of dollars a month. Plus significant restrictions on access etc. There was quite a good Guardian article about it.
A number of Western embassies in a number of countries deliberately have ramped up the public Wifi during specific events. For example elections where the local government shuts off the internet.
I'm sure that they do. They will not forget to record and track all the people using it. (Not that the US government is short of ways to get this data anyway.)
The very same guidelines also say: "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its 'flag' link."
I wondered if there was any cool 50 year old tech collecting dust there. But apparently the place wasn't abandoned: "the reopening of the embassy on the Malecón waterfront in Havana, previously used as an interests section, a limited diplomatic outpost, ". So this is quite boring.
I don't know about tech, but if the embargo is lifted, car enthusiasts will swim to that island. I hope the Cubans realize those old cars might be their only retirement, and don't sell to, "It's only worth this much to me?" Guys?
Not sure if this is what you meant by 50 yr old tech, but I thought this was an interesting side effect. They probably know more about fixing these cars than anyone else.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/25/cuba-classic-cars/
Very glad to see this, and hoping the trade embargo is ended soon. It's pretty clear, after five decades, that it has had the opposite of the intended effect -- that it has, in fact, kept the Castros in power. What's that quote about insanity being when you do the same thing over and over and expect different results?
Same as war on drugs, affordable housing, affirmative action, minimum wage etc.
One would assume after a program makes the situation worse, you would stop said program. But the rationale becomes to increase the power and funds of the program instead.
IMHO, sanctions against an autocratic regime do not work; they just make the autocrat stronger. See, for example: Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, North Korea, Cuba, etc.
Sanctions against a democratic regime (for various definitions of "democracy") can work: for example, Iran, USSR, South Africa, etc.
Fear of war could have been another motivator, I suppose. But I suspect that Iran is well aware of how unpopular such a war is likely to be in the U.S. So, yeah, I agree that it's probably the sanctions more than anything else.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9917996 and marked it off topic. The comment about sanctions isn't bad, but this thread should be about Cuba, not Iran. Let's keep our slow normalizations after decades of hostility distinct here.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadNot a bad record on Foreign Policy for Obama. (Ok, I am being very very generous in some areas and will let someone else lay out the opposite case but still...)
-Improve the US image abroad after Bush
-Get out of major boots on the ground in Iraq
-Get out of major boots on the ground in Afghanistan
-Kill Bin Laden
-Reduce the operational capability of Al-Qaeda core members
-Avoid getting dragged into boots on the ground in Syria / get chemical weapons out
-Overthrow Gaddafi
-Re-open Cuban Embassy
-Contain ISIS
-Re-focus on China
-Environment deal with China
-Get cooperation from the Pakistan ISI vs Taliban
-Improve long-term relations with India
-Gain trust of Asian states (like Vietnam) who are threatened by China
-Re-balance relationship with Israel
-Weaken Russia slowly (after getting out manoeuvred in Ukraine by Putin)
-Reduce dependance on Saudi Arabia
-Reduce dependence on foreign oil/gas
-Reduce the slow march of Chinese power in Africa (esp: Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa)
-Shore up NATO vs Russia
-Reduce the influence on Venezuela in South America
-Get a deal on Iranian nuclear program
-Lay the ground work for rebuilding the US military after 15 years of insurgent warfare
-Patch things up (behind the scenes) with Brazil and Germany after Snowden
-Rebuild economy (slowly) after the Bush mess and recession
(EDIT: Just to point out, I don't see these as exactly black and white issues and am well aware of the nuance. Just trying to give one side of an argument so others can do the rest. Even a portion of the stuff in there is a pretty decent record for a President.)
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1988-1...
>Re-balance relationship with Israel
What? We just gave Netanyahu a moral right to attack Iran as its clear they will get a nuke soon. The same way Israel had to stop Assad's nuclear program in Syria- via bombing (Operation Orchard).
>Overthrow Gaddafi
The brave people on Libya did that, NATO may has hastened his demise, but no one went after Gaddafi from the west; this was a civil war. Meanwhile Syria's al-Assad has 300,000 civilian deaths under his belt and we're all pretending this isn't happening because Obama won't confront Iran or Russia on this.
>Weaken Russia slowly
Russia is trivially annexing its neighbors and these "show sanctions" are doing next to nothing. Russia's economic slowdown was a long time coming and these sanctions haven't changed a thing. Putin is trivially murdering children in Ukraine and laughing about it on state television. "Oh that's not us" wink-wink.
>Shore up NATO vs Russia
NATO spending is still in the toilet, what are we shoring up exactly? Stretching out the USG because most of the NATO countries don't want to actually build a military? A few tanks in Estonia?
>Reduce dependence on foreign oil/gas
Destroying our environment via fracking shouldn't be applauded.
Look, Obama is a pretty good domestic president and a bad foreign policy president. Lots of innocents have died on his watch and many of those conflicts and deaths were 100% preventable. Its incredible how bad his foreign policy credentials are. I wish this wasn't true. I voted for him, twice, and am just shocked at how he is unable to compete on the world stage. He is routinely outsmarted and outfoxed by most nations.
Lastly, Cuba hasn't made any human rights reforms, is not committed to stopping the torture and jailing of political dissidents, etc but somehow magically gets normalization overnight via backroom deals and secret agreements? This happens out of the blue? Gee, I think Putin made a deal to Cuba and Cuba called Washington and said "You guys or Putin, pick now" and Obama folded because he's running scared from Putin on several fronts and doesn't need him in his backyard.
As a European in NATO, I presume, this should give you pause. Having the superpower that protects you running scared over paper tigers like Putin, Khamenei, Jinping, and the Castros should be worrying, not celebrated. I suspect Obama's focus on having a "legacy" means wrapping up issues as his time is running out. Shame that a lot of these decisions are poorly thought out and will come at a real human cost. A lot of his "landmark" foreign policy is just pushing conflicts onto the next president.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-file...
Edit:
Another great article on this:
http://www.npr.org/2015/04/23/401655832/secret-papers-reveal...
The entity now calling itself simply "the Islamic State" and claiming a global caliphate -- formerly styled Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, before that the separate Islamic State in Iraq and al-Nusra front in Syria, before that just the Islamic State in Iraq (al-Nusra front was an offshoot which later reunited), earlier still (before severing the ties it formed in 2004 with al-Qaeda) al-Qaeda in Iraq, and originally Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad -- has been around since 1999.
Certainly, the US war with al-Qaeda, the US invasion of Iraq, and the Syrian civil war each provided opportunities which it exploited in its growth, but none of them -- and certainly not the last of those -- can be credited with having "brought us" the organization.
And the Islamic State in Iraq held territory in Iraq and was fighting a campaign against the government there before it sent an offshoot group to Syria, it wasn't something formed in Syria which later invaded Iraq.
> I don't know how American news reports stuff, but if this is the result, you're getting very filtered news.
(Disclaimer. These opinions are for sample use and being contrarian only. Seriously advancing these opinions is a legitimate thing, but the purpose of this post is not to advance them. They will not be defended if you reply.)
Reduce dependence on foreign oil and gas? He's been against all sorts of oil projects and fracking from the moment he took office (although if you want to be pedantic Keystone is technically foreign oil). The mess around Gaddafi and Syria, and the troop withdrawals in Iraq, helped gave rise to ISIS/ISIL to begin with, and they're far from contained yet. NATO vs Russia has looked less like "shoring up" NATO and slowly weakening Putin than just letting Putin having his way with Ukraine (or "the Ukraine", if you're Putin). "Re-balance relation with Israel" could equally be construed as propping up Hamas and giving his blessing for Iran to build nuclear weapons. Re-establishing relations with Cuba is re-establishing relations with a totalitarian state and a bad idea! The environment deal will accomplish nothing in the end.
(end sample opinions)
I think there's a few too many caveats here, and that at best a few decades out we'll be looking at the Obama foreign-policy record as decidedly mixed.
Most of this is US foreign policy which is not specific to Obama, it just represents continuity from Bush.
It was our entry into Iraq which created enemies like ISIS, not the withdrawal from Iraq. Iraq was never going to be the 51st state.
I agree that Putin has been allowed to do whatever he wants, but the clear start of that was the Georgia fiasco under Bush, and the unspoken alternatives are extremely unpleasant. I hate what happened to Ukraine, but I wouldn't personally die to fight Putin about Ukraine, so why should I volunteer our troops to die for that? Was that ever really an option?
There is plenty of room to disagree about whether we should have been making deals with Iran and Cuba.
If someone has an honestly favorable impression, it doesn't mean they have "very high-spin bullet points" but the arguments you've advanced are clearly dishonest.
He has cleared not sicced his EPA on oil & gas companies heavily reliant on fracking, when he easily could have made their lives far more difficult.
Except his foreign policy doesn't exist in a vacuum and it's entirely subjective. Compared to Bush's 'big stick' foreign policy, for someone who doesn't live in the States, Obama truly is "change" personified.
I was in Japan when Obama was elected for his first term and there were people literally in tears at finding out that Obama had won. You'll see a couple news reports and interviews on youtube where you'll see them saying "Yeah, we're happy he won." then they would repeat his slogans "Change!" and "Yes we can!". But I had a chance to speak to a bunch of those people due to the nature of my job and after some rather in-depth questions, they weren't in tears because Obama had won, they were in tears because they were happy McCain/Palin lost. They didn't want another "crazy" republican in office. It was actually a bit shocking to learn that people abroad follow our politics more closely than a good many of our citizens. And it was interesting to see that they consider democrats the level headed bunch, and the more 'peaceful' party.
So I don't think they're a fan of Obama personally (though I'm sure some are), I think it's the fact that they prefer democratic foreign policy over republican foreign policy in general, and see republicans as war mongering neocons.
Well why wouldn't they? Just because Republicans run as the party of mature, responsible individuals who can see how liberal idealism sounds nice but will ultimately founder against the hard rocks of the real world doesn't mean that their real-world policy record bears out their propaganda. In fact, the Democrats are basically what most of the world considers responsible conservatives (eg: mature, responsible people who can see how idealism sounds nice but ultimately founders, and thus how stability is preferable above all else). The Republicans are considered far-right nationalists, warmongers, and religious crazies.
>So I don't think they're a fan of Obama personally (though I'm sure some are), I think it's the fact that they prefer democratic foreign policy over republican foreign policy in general, and see republicans as war mongering neocons.
Again: well yeah. Nixon went to China. Today's Republican foreign-policy establishment spent a lot of effort claiming that if we don't go to war with Iran, that if we in fact use diplomacy without invading, we're effectively Neville Chamberlain. They said exactly the same thing about Iraq, and look how that turned out.
If you want a mature, responsible conservative, vote for the Democrats. If you want an actual left, vote Socialist. The Republicans have been far-right since Bush II.
The troop withdrawal in Iraq was caused by an agreement signed between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government. The Obama administration tried (some say not hard enough, but it cannot be denied that it tried) to extend the deadline negotiated by the Bush administration, but the Iraqi government denied the extension.
If this is an example of "contrary analysis" you would have been better off sitting on your hands.
That was easy!
He didn't do this. He was just president in an ongoing operation that started a long time ago. He didn't pass any particular policies or make any changes that led to this.
>-Contain ISIS
ISIS started under him and it's not contained.
>-Get a deal on Iranian nuclear program
Also 10 years in the making and he made some significant concessions to Iran that made the deal almost useless. The US has to give nearly a months warning before it's allowed to check to see if they are breaking the rules.
-ISIS was formed before he took over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_...
It switched to its current name during his terms. It started well before.
> He didn't do this.
As if the president dons his cowboy hat, gets into an Apache Rambo-style and hunts terrorists, right?
I don't understand how any rational person would have so much difficulty giving him credit for the operation; it was his call! He made the call to get Bin Laden, just like Bush made the call to let him and other top Taliban escape (see "Kunduz Airlift": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_airlift )
First, it has been reported over and over that locating bin Laden was a priority of the Obama administration. Obama announced this in presidential debates, and redirected intelligence resources to this end after he was elected (directing DCI Panetta on June 2 2009 to find a detailed operational plan for locating bin Laden, among other things).
I think this priority shift is rather well established, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden#Backg...
Second: Obama personally accepted responsibility for conducting the raid. We all know how well that went for Jimmy Carter, so that was a real risk.
Third, and perhaps more controversial: It was reported at the time of the raid that Obama's concerns about getting the team out resulted in changing the plan in a key way (e.g., http://swampland.time.com/2011/05/03/obama-pushed-for-fight-...). This is what we have been told, but only time will tell.
The seeds for ISIS were sown when Bush & Rumsfeld disbanded the Iraqi Army. What else did they think would happen? Over 300,000 trained soldiers; many of them veterans of the Iran-Iraq war; suddenly jobless and without benefits. Their only marketable skill is how to shoot!
That said, here are his most important accomplishments:
- Standing down, mostly, as states begin legalizing pot and start to experiment with decriminalization of drugs
- Bringing focus to the US prison system, and obscene mandatory sentencing laws (working with the Koch brothers to boot)
- Not trying to block marriage equality
- Bringing some attention to asset seizures, removing some incentives for the police to steal
- Avoiding any further large scale wars, the US simply can't afford it; it's worth noting he wanted a much larger scale war effort against Syria, and found very little support for it, so he back-tracked
- Iran deal, avoiding the war that some would have liked to see; such a war would have been unimaginably destructive to the US economy, far worse than Iraq
- The strong dollar and oversupply of oil damaged Russia. The end of QE caused the dollar to rise. Obama's contribution was to not do anything stupid that might cause oil to soar, or the dollar to plunge
- Obamacare / ACA. His involvement was very limited, but he did champion it from the beginning. Not sure on this one though, it'll either end up being viewed as a giant debacle cost wise, or the program that marked the start of universal healthcare in the US and bending down the cost curve in healthcare via top-down government mandate.
* Nuclear disarmament (you know, what he ostensibly got his Nobel peace prize for)... yeah, that's firmly dead in the water.
* The big Muslim reconcilation (his big speech in Cairo in 2009)... post-Arab Spring, there's a lot of disillusionment in the Muslim world considering that actions haven't matched up to those words.
* Syria's chemical weapons, wherein Obama threatened heavy repercussions should Syria use them in its civil war. Said heavy repercussions turned out to be merely exporting those weapons and not even anything so hefty as extracting an admission of guilt or instituting a trial in the ICC or ICJ over their use.
* The Asian pivot, whose biggest practical effect has been to cause allies to question America's willingness to uphold its own commitments.
* The Russian "reset"... okay, this one is Putin's fault. :-)
You can argue that, in many respects, Obama is/was constrained by public opinion, but that's just the mark of the most common failure of politicians: the politicians whose names echo through history are not the ones who follow public opinion, but the ones who lead it.
As a thought experiment, do you think that Putin would have attempted to dislodge Crimea from Ukraine or Assad would have used chemical weapons had Bush still been in power? If you're tempted to answer "no," then that is a success of Bush's foreign policy. But if words will never be backed up with power, then words are just words and can be safely ignored.
But none of them came anywhere close to the debacle of Iraq. The "red line" nonsense was definitely bad. Making big declarations and ignoring them is not smart. But it's not even on the same level as invading a sovereign nation, getting a million or so people killed, and wasting an unimaginable amount of money for no reason.
I don't know that Ukraine qualifies as bad US foreign policy. We don't really have a responsibility there. (Contrary to the popular rhetoric on the internet, the treaty under which Ukraine gave up their Soviet-era nuclear weapons merely required the signatories to respect Ukrainian sovereignty, not guarantee it. Russia is violating that treaty, but the treaty does not require the US to assist.)
Would Assad have used chemical weapons had Bush still been in power? Maybe not. But seeing as how Bush is responsible for the whole regional mess in the first place, that hardly seems like plus on his side.
Would Russia have taken Crimea if Bush were still in power? I don't see why not. Not only did Bush waste a ton of lives and money, he also set the precedent that he would ignore any country capable of actually resisting. He invaded Iraq for imaginary WMDs, but ignored North Korea's actual WMDs even though they were a part of the "axis of evil." Russia has even more WMDs than North Korea and I imagine they would be confident that nothing would be done.
After more than a decade of the US being involved in a mistaken invasion, we, as a nation, are war weary. Without a serious issue within our borders, the US simply will not do it. Every analyst, both in the US and outside, knows that.
I personally think the "red line" thing was mostly good PR for the anti-Obama politicians. I don't think it had any real impact on our foreign policy. The words the President used weren't, as so often claimed, "If Syria uses chemical weapons, we'll invade". He said, quoting him from his comments on Aug. 20, 2012; "We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation." By the time we knew that chemical weapons had been used, many other things had also happened, too, so the "equation" had a lot of new variables.
The deal with Iran isn't exactly disarmament, but it's somewhere in the same ballpark at least.
If you had told me in 2008 that Obama would be signing extrajudicial death-by-drone warrants every Tuesday morning I would have laughed. But, here we are...
Don't forget the Japan mutual defense deal, the upcoming Korea unification and all the other hundred things in the Asia Pacific.
Be careful about many of these things - the way you present them needs to be pretty careful. The goal in the Asia-Pacific (TPP included) is to contain China with a balance of power in their region. This includes Australia, Philippines, Japan of course, Guam, and Singapore, Vietnam, India, Thailand, Northern Mariana Islands, etc. Ukraine was being purposefully Westernized (Project UNITER) for inclusion into the EU and Russia is the goal after Ukraine. It is against the backdrop of NATO, EU and in general Western liberal expansion that Russia solidified its position in Crimea. In other words many of the things you list here can be seen as policy failures or at least haven't played themselves out (Saudi Arabia and Israel with Iranian nuclear deal, etc). We don't know whether this will actually prevent Israel from invading Iran yet.
Yadda yadda.
Anyway, thanks for compiling a list. It's hard to follow American domestic politics without understanding American Foreign policy and Geostrategy. So it's good to see information and dialogue posted here.
During the White House press briefing the WH spokesperson mentioned that normalizing ties was being done for international strategic purposes (and of course, Cuba was blacklisted for similar and for political reasons - not because they had anything to do with terrorism). I don't actually know what they mean by this. Do you have some idea of what strategic investment/partnership is being made?
The what now?!
Uh, a bunch of other associated facts. But yeah, give it a pretty short couple of years and you're going to see this happen.
The anthrax thing is reporting facts. I didn't say that the US IS organizing this. I didn't say NK was RIGHT about their worries. What I did say about anthrax is quite true.
No leg pulling sir.
Nevertheless, if the discussion can't rise above garden-variety political bickering, we're going to bury it.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-in...
[shameless plug] We're holding a meetup next Saturday in Havana: http://www.meetup.com/merchise/events/223604638/
It's been great for Canadian mining companies.
You might go there to look at them, but you wouldn't want to bring them home.
If it doesn't work, stop doing it.
Sanctions against a democratic regime (for various definitions of "democracy") can work: for example, Iran, USSR, South Africa, etc.
Yes and yes.