Here's Obama's foreign policy legacy (a thread that will be anathema to the usual Obama worshipers):
(1) Reduced US military presence in Europe to under 30,000 troops (less than the number of police officers in NYC). A few years later Russia invades Ukraine and annexes Crimea, and US troops had to be rushed back in.
(2) Pulled US troops out of Iraq (here's a 2012 clip in which he's berating Romney for wanting to keep troops). Two years later ISIS descended upon Iraq taking over Mosul and large amounts of US weapons. US troops had to be rushed back in.
(3) Imposed a "red line" in Syria, then walked it back (in order not to piss off the Iranian regime), and accepted Putin as guarantor to disarm Putin's own Syrian poodle. Assad went ahead to use chemical weapons, and Putin went on to deepen his involvement in Syria.
(4) Offered a deal to the Iranian regime that only someone wearing blinkers would think of as a good deal - the aftermath saw expansionary aggressive intervention by the Iranian regime, and an explosion of instability across the Middle East.
I won't even bring up Afghanistan, where the Taliban now control or threaten nearly 70% of territory, and where ISIS has also gained a foothold.
And I didn't even get into Obama's China policy. State sponsored hacks started during Obama's time, both before *and* after Obama made a "deal* with Xi Jinping to stop China's commercial hacking. edition.cnn.com/2017/11/27/pol…
I won't get into Obama's failure to stand up to petty Middle Eastern dictatorships during the peak of the Arab Spring, whose failure was again not inevitable.
These petty Arab dictators would in due course intervene blatantly and directly into US elections on the side of Trump. Obama's weakness inspired intervention.
Obama wanted to be the un-Bush, but seems to have fallen for the fallacy that if one US president stabs you and twists the knife, the next one can undo the stab by just yanking out the knife and leaving.
In the video linked earlier in the thread, Obama actually utters the words "the Cold War is over". He went on to create the conditions that allowed a new Cold War - this time with a Russian regime emboldened thanks to his foreign policy failures and miscalculations.
We can call them "miscalculations" but the effects have been absolutely disastrous. Imagine if in 2014 ISIS couldn't just sweep and take Mosul, becoming a Caliphate and reinstating sex slavery in the 21st century.
Or, imagine if Assad couldn't go on to use chemical weapons dozens of times with complete impunity, destroying and displacing entire communities and creating wave after wave of refugees who would reach Europe, triggering a right-wing backlash
Or imagine if Putin didn't find a space to exploit fissures in the world order, create massive waves of refugees, gnaw at international norms, and ultimately become so emboldened as to attempt to subvert democratic elections.
Also I don't think you can call it "miscalculation" when Obama basically went against the best advice of his entire security & military establishment. He was just so personally dogmatic and, like Bush, thought that "history" would vindicate him. politico.com/magazine/story…
The collapse of the so-called "liberal world order" started not under Trump but under Obama. It was of course *severely* damaged by Bush - but Obama could have saved it. Instead, he let it collapse further, opening the space to an emboldened Putin and to further collapse.
Continue worshiping Obama. Just don't expect us not to call out your Messiah for his role in our catastrophes. You can blame your problems on Trump, but it was Obama's 8 years that set the stage for Trump to happen.
