Young people tend to think that Barack Obama was a great president, maybe the greatest in American history, but this judgment is apparently based more on subjective reasons - his race and personal eloquence and charisma, etc. - than on objective evidence.
If one sets aside one's ideological and personal sympathies and looks objectively at the record of the Obama administration, as PJ Media's Matt Margolis does with just the administration's foreign policy, a quite different picture emerges.
Margolis discusses five foreign policy messes that Obama either caused or exacerbated and left for his successor to clean up. Here are the five with a summary of Margolis' comments about them and a couple of parenthetical comments from me:
1. Appeasement of Russia: Obama’s version of improving relations with Russia enabled annexation of Crimea, increased presence in the Middle East and propping up both the Assad regime in Syria and the Iranian mullahs, amongst other things.
Not even our own country’s national security was safe from Obama’s capitulation to Russia.The Obama administration bizarrely approved the transfer of 20 percent of America’s Uranium mining capability to Russia, and utterly ignored Russian attempts to interfere with the U.S. election in 2016.
In fact, Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice gave a “stand-down” order in response to Russian cyberattacks in the summer of 2016.
2. Backing down from his Syrian Red Line: In August 2012, Barack Obama said that the use of chemical weapons by the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria would cross his “red line.” Almost exactly a year later, more than 1,400 Syrian people were killed by the regime with sarin gas. The red line was crossed, and Obama backtracked, playing down his “red line” comment, and trying to pass it off as not really his own red line, but the international community’s.
While Obama failed to enforce his line and hold the regime accountable, President Trump did not. When a major chemical attack occurred on his watch, Trump responded. Had Obama followed through on his red line, it’s likely that thousands of lives would have been saved.
Obama didn’t want to face the music with Syria, because he was hoping to reset relations with Russia — which was supporting the Assad regime.
3. Allowing the rise of ISIS: To say Barack Obama dropped the ball by failing to address the rise of ISIS is an understatement. Despite being warned in his daily intelligence briefings, he was quick to dismiss ISIS as a “jayvee team” in order to perpetuate the myth that he had contained the terrorist threat in the Middle East. (He was also cautioned that withdrawing our troops from Iraq was leaving a vacuum that bad guys like ISIS would quickly fill, which they did. RLC)
Obama’s misjudgment resulted in ISIS expanding its territory, taking control over large portions of Iraq, Syria and Libya. ISIS still remains a threat, but instead of expanding, they've been hit hard and lost territory and, thanks to a drastic change in strategy under President Trump, we've seen “100 percent” defeat of the ISIS caliphate in just two years.
4. War in Libya: President Obama decided to start an illegal war with Libya. They hadn’t attacked us or threatened us, but nevertheless, Obama, with the approval of Congress, sent troops to take part in what was a civil war.
(Margolis is being a bit unfair here. The Gaddafi regime was about to commit genocidal war against its domestic opponents which is why Obama sent troops and air power against him. That was a mistake, however, since other avenues were available to Obama short of military attack. His administration, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton simply wanted to get rid of Gaddafi so they were reluctant to pursue policies which allowed him to remain in power. RLC)
Libyan Muammar Gaddafi was by no means a good guy, but he voluntarily got rid of all of his weapons of mass destruction in December 2003 in response to the war in Iraq, and he was essentially contained. His death in that conflict resulted in the country’s destabilization and enabled the growth of ISIS in the region.
Obama’s Libya policy was a total quagmire, and even Obama described Libya as the "worst mistake" of his presidency for his failure to plan for a post-Gaddafi Libya.
5. The Iran nuclear deal: To be sure, the United States and Iran haven’t been on good terms for over forty years. That said, Obama’s appeasement of Iran, a terror state determined to destroy Israel and the West, made the situation much worse. President Obama claimed his nuclear deal with Iran would make America safer, but it was in fact a massive bribe in which the U.S. gave Iran billions of dollars of frozen assets in return for empty promises that did little to slow Iran's development of ballistic missiles and their nuclear program.
The deal was so bad that Obama didn’t even attempt to get Senate ratification for it. Multiple violations of the deal were ignored, Iran was never held accountable for those violations, and the money kept flowing. Obama was so desperate to achieve the deal that not even an attempted bomb plot on American soil earned a reprisal from the Obama administration. Violations continued under Trump, who ultimately got us out of the deal and restored sanctions.
These are only President Obama's foreign policy missteps. His domestic and economic measures only managed to make the picture of his tenure in office look bleaker.