The End of Obama’s Foreign Policy Delusions

The end of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad’s regime has likely taken with it the so-called Axis of Resistance confected by Iran and its proxies in order to eliminate Israel and replace the U.S. as the region’s premier power. This malign cabal promises to go down in history as one of the most dangerous examples of the West’s feckless foreign policy idealism, the master narrative and received wisdom that shaped and rationalized Obama’s foreign policy––and its sequel during Biden’s term staffed with Obama’s personnel.

Will this repudiation of Obama’s foreign policy also put paid to the “rules-based international order” whence it came? And will foreign policy realism be restored to the State Department?

Obama’s foreign policy was obviously a product of the clichés and bromides of the foreign policy establishment that comprisesfederal bureaucracies, leftist media, universities, and think-tanks. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, our foreign policy mavens have embraced tenets and principles such as global interests and norms should trump national ones, and “soft power” like diplomacy should be prized over military force. In short, “diplomatic engagement,” international covenants, supranational institutions, and a globalist rather than a nationalist perspective would now keep global order and promote peace and prosperity.

Moreover, the controlling assumptions behind these ideals was that the whole world desires Western democracy and its cargo:individual rights, rule by law, tolerance for ethnic and religious minorities, separation of church and state, and widely distributed prosperity. Also, violent conflicts like wars, invasions, occupations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are the product of the lack of those goods. And the West should provide the “rest”with those boons by the limited and carefully calibrated use of force, but more importantly through “soft power” ––cultural influences, global institutions, international trade, NGOs, and foreign aid.

From the beginning, these ideals featured in Obama’s writings and speeches at home and abroad. In 2007, in Foreign Affairs he took to task the previous administration’s failed diplomacy anditchy trigger-finger that ended up with an invasion of Iraq, the evidence of a need to “reinvigorate American diplomacy,” “renew American leadership in the world,” and “to rebuild the alliances, partnerships, and institutions necessary to confront common threats and enhance common security.” Consistent with the globalist framework, Obama sounded the cringing, soft oikophobic notes of Jimmy “malaise” Carter, as when he advised that we use our power and wealth to improve the global community, “not in the spirit of a patron but in the spirit of a partner––a partner mindful of his own imperfections.”

Also typical of the “rules-based international order” was Obama’s unseemly “apology tour,” especially his 2009 comments in Cairo. Earlier in his State of the Union speech, hehad specifically addressed the Muslim nations with a solicitouspromise of a “new way forward, based on mutual interests and mutual respect” ––Western diplomatic clichés lacking any awareness of orthodox Islam’s teaching about infidels.

In Cairo, his audience included representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, the “godfather,” as Lee Smith put it, of modern jihadism, which made his remarks even more clueless. His focus was on the Western sins that provoked the terrorist attack on 9/11, and the subsequent “tensions” between the West and Islam: especially a “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-minority were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

The former charge betrays a remarkable ignorance of history, given that Islam is one of history’s most successful colonial empires, a consequence of invasion, conquest, and settlement––and one that 2500 years later still occupies territories that were Greco-Roman and Hebraic for millennia. As for the lattercharge, it bespeaks the arrogance of the West to deny Muslimnations any agency in their rulers’ choice to align either with the U.S. or the Soviet Union, based on their estimation of which power would most benefit them and their interests.

Given his embrace of foreign policy idealism, naïve Third-Worldism, and leftist animus against the U.S. and Israel, Obamasaw the problem of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as an opportunity for a legacy foreign policy achievement. Hence began the misbegotten Iran JCPOA, the “nuclear deal” that put Iran’s brutal and antisemitic theocracy on the glide-path to possessing nuclear bombs, one accompanied by billions of dollars in Western danegeld.

And this craven appeasement has continued during Biden’s term, despite Iran’s attacks on our troops, kidnapping of our citizens, serial violations of the treaty, training and arming of terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah, threats and attacks on our allies, especially Israel, cooperation with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and support of a brutal dictator in Syria.

All the disorder and assaults on our interests in the Middle East are the consequences of Obama’s foreign policy and its continuation by his loyalists who directed Biden’s rancid foreign policy idealism that still drives the “nuclear deal” with Iran. But that was part of a larger goal of clipping Israel’s wing by aiding Iran to become a regional counterweight to Saudi Arabia. Obama also had a hand in perpetuating Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, turning him into a partner of the Iranians and the Russians.

Obama’s mishandling of the Syrian civil war was another blunder that worsened conditions in an already dysfunctional region. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, “It’s worth recalling Barack Obama’s role in keeping Mr. Assad in power. Mr. Obama declined to support the opposition in any important way and then refused to enforce his ‘red line’ against Mr. Assad’s use of sarin and chlorine gas to kill his own people.

Incredibly, Mr. Obama invited Russia to help end the civil war. Vladimir Putin obliged by joining with Iran to prop up Mr. Assad, elbowing the U.S. out, and establishing an air base and a long-desired naval base on the Mediterranean. This misjudgment helped Iran expand its Axis of Resistance from Tehran to Beirut. It also reversed the strategic triumph achieved by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s in minimizing the Soviet Union’s influence in the Middle East.”

The election of Donald Trump means we have a good chance of undoing much of the damage Obama inflicted on our foreign policy and on our national security by empowering terrorists and autocrats like Vladimir Putin, and by ushering Iran to the threshold of possessing nuclear weapons.

But the responsibility for these failures is bipartisan. Barack Obama was following the received wisdom of the “rules-based international order” that began to develop over a century ago. It became unexamined orthodoxy after the Cold War, when the victory was credited not to the U.S.’s strategy of containment, forward deployed troops, and thousands of nuclear warheads. Instead, the “new world order,” exporting liberal democracy, diplomatic engagement, and global trade could create a “harmony of interests” that would make war an anachronismand global peace a possibility.

George H.W. Bush in his 1991 State of the Union address called it a “new world order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.” In such a world, violent conflict and bellicose nationalism would in time give way to the boons of globalism: multinational institutions, international law and courts, and “diplomatic engagement.”

Barack Obama is a true believer in all these claims founded on numerous begged questions. In his cringing speech in Cairo, Obama informed, and no doubt insulted, his Muslim listeners: “I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights.”

These idealistic nostrums dominate foreign policy establishment despite numerous failures, most recently Joe Biden’s bungling retreat from Afghanistan, and dangerous mishandling of Iran and its proxies’ heinous attacks on Israel––errors fostered by Obama’s serial appeasement of Iran. As Eli Lake recently wroteabout Biden’s shamelessly taking credit for the collapse of Assad’s regime and other Iranian setbacks: “Biden’s empty boast about Assad’s demise is a punchline. But his foreign policy was not an anomaly. He channeled the Obama-era conventional wisdom that captured a generation of Washington’s foreign policy elites. Their assumptions about Iran now lay bare and exposed for the world to see as the region realigns. And yet they remain in their perches on Congressional committees, at the best think tanks, and in the top op-ed pages. So it’s worth asking: What else might they be wrong about?”

The answer to Lake’s rhetorical question is, pretty much everything since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Trump and his new foreign policy team need to return forthwithto foreign policy realism, which acknowledges that our enemies and rivals––no matter how much they indulge our idealistic rhetoric–– don’t believe in the “rules-based international order,” or that the free, prosperous West is the universal paradigm they want to emulate, instead of a despised barrier to the tyrannical power they want to wield. The discrediting of Obama’s failures is just the prelude to restoring realism, traditional wisdom, and common sense.

Obama renounced any loyalty he might ever have had to the USA early on. Went to Berlin Germany (of all places!) and declared that his loyalties were to the world.

The Europeans have great enthusiasm for a weak America led by feckless and corrupt hacks. They loved Obama.

Nice piece, and thanks for posting. The author is correct about the roots of this odd set of foreign policy assumptions being a century old, resembling as they do many of Wilson's nostrums after the fall of the Great Powers paradigm. International chumship works just fine until somebody sees an opportunity in not playing. Quite a lot of somebodies, actually.

I do remember GHWB's rather alarming "New World Order" speech, indicating that these assumptions had been in place among Western leadership and permeated the philosophies of our own State Department long before 0bama was tragically spawned. This is descriptive:

Obama’s foreign policy was obviously a product of the clichés and bromides of the foreign policy establishment that comprises federal bureaucracies, leftist media, universities, and think-tanks.

The cure, therefore, will have to involve a generational change in such institutions and not simply a haircut at the top. That will be well beyond the four years allotted to Trump to fix everything that has gone wrong in the world for the last half century. And sadly, there is little sign of such a miracle taking place. It's going to be a long slog.

Obama’s foreign policy can be summed up in 4 words, Support the Muslim Brotherhood. Libya, Egypt, Syria... all interventions to replace known, admittedly bad, actors with unknown worse. Biden’s is the same with Iran appeasement and billions of $ laundered and repatriated into Democrat coffers.

Obama’s foreign policy can be summed up in 4 words, Support the Muslim Brotherhood.

Not quite. Obama's foreign policy was support the most legitimate foreign actors, with their legitimacy demonstrated by their anti-Americanism.

There has been a strong thread in Leftism of desiring revolutionary change, and thus opposition to the status quo powers, going back to the French revolution. Prior to ~1870 the status quo powers were Monarchies, and prior to 1918 nearly all were monarchies, thus the left was anti-monarchist. This left them uncertain of where the US was on their friend or foe spectrum as the US was both pro status quo and anti-monarchical. The left only turns strongly anti-American post ~1960 as both the old guard of leftist thinkers die off, and the US definitively shows itself to be the enforcer of the status quo.

"The end of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad’s regime has likely taken with it the so-called Axis of Resistance confected by Iran and its proxies in order to eliminate Israel and replace the U.S. as the region’s premier power. "

every foreign policy in the past several decades includes the installation of a laundry machine where everyone shares in the American tax payer money before it ever gets to where we are told it goes. We have far neglected our people and its time we hold those responsible and start taking care of our own, this I hope starts in january

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