{UAH} HISTORY WILL JUDGE OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY LEGACY AS ONE OF A FAILURE

History will judge Obama’s foreign policy legacy as one of failure

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim

As President Obama is about to leave the White House at the end of the year, the legacy he leaves behind will be mixed. He has averted a second Great Depression, has saved theCAR industry in the United States, and gave Americans what seven other presidents have tried and failed to deliver: comprehensive healthcare. And despite battling a hostile and deliberately obstructionist Congress year after year since 2010, he has managed to move things forward in a progressive direction in most areas of life.

Almost everything you would impute the President as a failure in domestic politics can be laid down squarely at the feet of Congress Republicans who have gone out of their way to sabotage the administration at whatever cost. Otherwise, his record is quite impressive.

But the same cannot be said about Obama’s record on foreign policy. And it is not likely that history will look kindly on his legacy in this regard.

To be fair to the President, he was not dealt an easy hand. He had to contend with the legacy of two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the devastation they brought to American war coffers and to political stability in the Middle East. After the Global Financial Crisis when Obama took office, the entire world was shaken to the core. Political and administrative institutions have suffered everywhere, including in the developed world.

But in the Middle East, these factors were combined with chronic poor governance, a ballooning youth population who suffered from huge rates of unemployment, and corrupt leaders from yesteryear who no longer had the capacity to inspire the loyalty of any of their citizens except through brutal repression.

The entire region was a powder keg waiting to blow up. And blow up it did, when it was lit up by Mohamed Bouazizi, the 27-year-old man who set himself on fire in protest at the economic conditions in his native Tunisia, and sparked what became known as the Arab Spring.

Where did it all go wrong?

In the early days, the Arab Spring seemed like the greatest opportunity to reshape the Muslim world and global geopolitics towards a brighter future in two generations. And the United States was there to support the democratic governments who were to emerge from the uprisings and help them integrate properly into the global system.

Obama does not seem to have considered what happens if America stops being the power and authority behind a global system of international law which we have been building since WW2.

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim

But then, things went horribly wrong. And the United States has a fair share of responsibility for the way things have turned up. Much of it will the legacy of those two disastrous Bush wars. But Obama made his own mistakes too.

The one thing that Obama will never be able to live off is his decision not to punish the Assad regime in Syria when they used chemical weapons against civilians in Damascus. That single decision was what turned Syria from a routine civil war to a humanitarian disaster that is still raging after five years and which has significantly redrawn the geopolitical power map.

But it would be a mistake to argue about that decision with the benefit of hindsight. We now know that this decision is what ultimately led to the rises of the horror that is ISIS and has enabled Russian to bulldoze its way into the Middle East again, with their usual predilection for bombing hospitals and aid workers and all. But these are not the reasons why Obama was wrong not to intervene: after all, how could he have known that things would turn up this way? None of us could have known.

Yet we could have known this: if we refuse to uphold international law even in cases where there are such blatant violations, then international law counts for nothing. If the United States shirks its responsibilities to uphold international law because it judges that it would not to be in its national interests to do so, then that invites every chance to take a piece of the geopolitical pie: and you do not need to ask Vladimir Putin twice for him to jump on such an opportunity. The absence of American leadership and authority invited Russia, Iran, the Gulf States and Turkey, and the global jihadi movement all to pile into the conflict, with predictable consequences.

Obama had the authority and the power to enforce the chemical weapons “Red Line” he drew to President Assad. He was concerned what might happen next if Assad was toppled in a disorderly fashion and whether this would mean the US would get tangled in the country for years to come as had happened in Iraq. And that was a legitimate concern. But he does not seem to have considered what happens if America stops being the power and authority behind a global system of international law which we have been building since WW2. The full consequences of this are yet to play out. But what we have seen so far gives us every reason to be fearful of the future.

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Azeem Ibrahim is an RAI Fellow at Mansfield College, University of Oxford and Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. He completed his PhD from the University of Cambridge and served as an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a World Fellow at Yale. Over the years he has met and advised numerous world leaders on policy development and was ranked as a Top 100 Global Thinker by the European Social Think Tank in 2010 and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He tweets @AzeemIbrahim

Last Update: Thursday, 7 April 2016 KSA 09:21 - GMT 06:21

 

 

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