A deeply flawed legacy: Hugh Steadman provides an alternative view of President Obama's foreign policy record.

• Author: Steadman, Hugh

The newly installed Trump presidency would appear to offer the potential for a sea-change in US foreign policy. America's foreign policy under President Obama's administration included a number of failures--in nuclear policy, in Europe, in Asia, in Africa and in the Middle East. There were successes too. These include the avoidance of large-scale involvement of American forces in any ground war, the re-establishment of American dominance in Latin America and, most importantly, his agreement with China, which paved the way for the Paris Accord on climate change. The Obama administration will be remembered for providing a relatively peaceful intermission after the Bush years.

**********

The Obama presidency has come to an end. In regard to American foreign policy, there is good reason to feel nervous about the future. Of the two possible outcomes of the recent election, however, the one deemed most probable--Hillary Clintons election--would have been viewed as the more worrisome by some students of global affairs who had followed her history as secretary of state and her more recent belligerent pronouncements on Russia and Syria.

With the advantage of hindsight, the outside world should be grateful to Barack Obama for having provided a relatively peaceful intermission after the Bush years. Throughout his two terms in office, he was faced with massive opposition to his policies, both domestic and overseas. For much of the time, many of the obstacles came from an overwhelmingly Republican House of Representatives. Throughout both terms, opposition came from the neo-con colonised State Department, the Pentagon and associated security agencies, which constantly schemed for more aggressive overseas policies.

On his assuming office in January 2009, there were universal hopes, outside the military industrial complex, that Obama's presidency would be more peaceable than that of his predecessor, George W Bush. One of Obama's first announcements was of his intention to close the Guantanamo detention centre. At the same time, he declared his intention to make the world nuclear free, which featured in the citation for his Nobel Peace Prize later that year: "The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.' Both Gitmo and the current investment in the United States' nuclear weaponry provide a measure of the extent of the opposition offered to Obama by the circling hawks that blacken Washington's skies. Gitmo, albeit with a reduced population, was still going strong, with no closure in sight, when his term ended.

For distant observers, the relationship between the office of the president and the multiple agencies of executive government can only be viewed through a cracked, distorting mirror. Every internal memorandum is classified to a greater or lesser extent and the media is tightly geared to publishing 'leaks' of whatever whichever agency wants the public to think is the truth. The observer can only draw inferences from the occasional whistle-blower and the manifestations of executive action, which occur, all too often, on other peoples territory.

Willing deference

It could well be argued that, generally speaking, Obama was a man of peace and compromise, who, lacking deep familiarity with military and foreign affairs, deferred too willingly to the advice of those who claimed to be more knowledgeable. Clinton, as his secretary of state throughout his first term, is a case in point. By the time he finally realised what was going on, it was too late and the defence and security establishments were prepared to by-pass him as yesterday's man, no longer relevant to the future they had in mind. (1)

Although the United States is back on its economic feet, despite the financial crisis inherited from Bush, after his eight years in office Obama's legacy will be to have left America more divided than ever. Obama can hardly be held responsible for the development of such a schism, nor for his inability to remedy it. It could instead be argued that it was not his fault, but the fault of American society and the stresses imposed on it by the current phase of the imperial life-cycle.

Overseas, the failures, not of the president but of his advisors, are legion. With two salient and several minor exceptions, America's enemies and friends overseas cannot help but be impressed by the tally of policy objectives not achieved and the extreme wastefulness and suffering caused by all these futile manoeuvrings. The only good thing to be said about such comprehensive failure is that it might lead the American foreign policy establishment to realise that their assessment of the global situation, and of their rightful place in it, is fundamentally flawed.

Numerous failures

Given constraints of time and space, each of the...