Stumbling through history: How did U.S. foreign policy end up in such disarray?

Politico ^ | Joe Scarborough

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Yemen is in flames, ISIL is on the march, Syria is apocalyptic, Iran is racing through Iraq, anarchy reigns in Libya, Jordan is on the brink, Turkey is slipping away, and America’s relationship with the Middle East’s only democracy has hit an all-time low.

When academics look back to survey the wreckage of U.S. foreign policy at the start of the 21st century, many will wonder how a superpower with unrivaled military, economic, and cultural dominance lost that historic advantage so quickly. The answer? George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

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Liberal historians will trace much of the region’s turmoil to President Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq. That war of choice was our turbulent era’s original sin — a misguided response to the horrors of September 11. Mr. Bush’s march to Baghdad squandered the international goodwill Americans enjoyed after bin Laden’s terror attacks, and doomed not only Iraq, but also Afghanistan, because of the neglect brought on by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Conservative historians may concede that Bush’s Wilsonian foreign policy was disastrous, but still argue that Barack Obama inherited a bad hand from Mr. Bush but made it even worse. Unfortunately for Americans of all ideologies, both liberal and conservative critiques of these two presidents will prove to be correct. In the end, Bush and Obama were clearly overmatched by the events of their day.

Like George W. Bush, Mr. Obama’s foreign policy was driven more by blind ideology than sound reason. Bush’s neoconservative fantasy of exporting freedom to all four corners of the globe set loose a chain of events that brought chaos to the heart of the Middle East, cost Americans 4,000 lives, and taxpayers over a trillion dollars.

Bush’s ideological foreign policy was tragically followed by Obama’s delusional belief that America could erase the sins of the Bush-Cheney era by simply abdicating the U.S.’s role as indispensable nation.

According to this liberal fairy tale retold often during the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama’s enlightened approach to foreign policy would once again make the United States beloved across the globe. It’s just too bad that long-term geopolitical strategy proved to be as far above the 44th president’s pay grade as it was for George W. Bush. As Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin notes, the only countries who arguably have a better relationship with America today than they had before Mr. Obama became president are Cuba and Iran.

Despite the sectarian meltdown that gripped Iraq in 2006 and 2007, the Petraeus Surge and the Sunni Awakening transformed the war ravaged country to such a degree that war correspondents like the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins told me that by 2008, Iraq’s security situation had improved so much as to make the country unrecognizable from what it had been just a few years before. Barack Obama, who opposed the surge in 2007, told Americans in September 2008 that it had actually “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

Sadly, the stability brought to Iraq was short-lived because after candidate Obama became President Obama, the Democrat became more obsessed with reversing Bush administration policies than maintaining a stable Middle East. By retreating too quickly from Iraq, ignoring mass murder in Syria, abandoning Iranian reformers being shot in Tehran’s streets, blowing up Libya and then leaving it to burn, ignoring ISIL until it the terror group metastasized across the Middle East, antagonizing the Sunni world by launching a desperate bid for an Iranian nuclear deal, and stiff-arming America’s two most important regional allies in Jerusalem and Cairo, Barack Obama has somehow inherited a dangerously unfocused U.S. foreign policy and reduced it to rubble.

If historians are to find mitigating factors in Bush and Obama’s foreign policy failures, it may be this: that Al Qaeda has failed to launch another attack on U.S. soil over the past 14 years. While that may have sounded like an impressive policy success in the months following September 11, let us hope that America’s next commander in chief does more than react reflexively to a terror attack or the excesses of the president he replaced.

[trebb]

This article is a testimony that sometimes “hindsight” means “the initial view one gets as he pulls his head partway out of his behind”.

[bert]

Real historians will remember W as the conqueror of Baghdad and Barack Obama as the black President that defamed the race

[SMARTY]

But...but...he got the Nobel prize?

Well, that means the next time you go to by toilet paler, there should be Nobel Prizes sitting next to the Charmin!! :)

[Sicon]

Boomers that never grew up are now running the asylum.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Winner!

[Cronos]

I think the problem started with George Bush Senior on many counts:

1. He went after Saddam hussein -- Saddam was an evil dictator, but he was a secular evil dictator who was the enemy of the Irani Ayatollahs and Al-Qaeda and he threatened Saudi Arabia (the latter reason is why he is out), but if we let him keep Kuwait he would by now be killing off jihadis and have knocked out the ayatollahs and cowed the Saudis and Qataris
2. He didn't do more to engage the Russians after the fall of communism

And this was continued and exacerbated by Clintoon

1. He didn't fully engage with Russia -- when it was floundering under Yeltsin that owuld have been the time to be the magnanimous winner and made it our ally, like we did at the end of WWII with Germany and Japan
2. He gave too much to China andhelped fuel their rise
3. He didn't knock off the Taliban when he had the chance

[Cronos]

That doesn’t exonerate Obama, but GW played the cards he was dealt and Obama made a bad hand worse...

[securityman]

John kasich was his best friend. They both left office at the same time and both were best friends with Gary condit. Shame that poor woman was murded to cover up an affair with one of those 3 gentlemen.

[Verginius Rufus]

Don’t forget Jimmy Carter’s role in assisting the overthrow of the shah of Iran.

[Cronos]

About that I don't know too much. But I do know that the Iranian revolution was, like the 1917 Russian revolution, a revolution of many different groups -- some antithetical to each other -- for instance there were liberals who allied with the Ayatollah to get a broad coalition against the Shah. And then the Ayatollah turned against them. The same thing happened with the Bolsheviks and during the Egyptian overthrow of Mubarak (lesson: never tie up with crazies, they'll cause more problems than what you are overthrowing)

Anyway, the Shah had a lot of people against him and would have fallen one way or the other I think (but I don't know). I think the Shah's position was more tenuous than Ghaddafis