American president Barack Obama walks through a hallway of the White House in Washington DC, August 8, 2013 (White House/Pete Souza)
I wasn’t a fan of Barack Obama eight years ago, when we started the Atlantic Sentinel. It unnerved me how many people, especially here in Europe, fell over themselves to praise the new president and I disagreed with his policies.
Now I’m sad to see him go.
It’s not just that the Democrat looks like a paragon of grace and wisdom compared to his Republican successor, although Donald Trump’s shortcomings in both areas are profound.
It’s that I’ve become less right-wing and Obama was a better president in his second term than in his first. Read more
American president Barack Obama talks with advisors at the White House in Washington DC, September, 18, 2015 (White House/Pete Souza
The faded signs of “Hope and Change” still linger in the attics and closets of millions of Americans. I still have my old campaign t-shirt; I worked the phone bank in 2008 in Arizona, where ubiquitous caller ID screens let people decide if they were going to thank me or shout at me before they even picked up. “We ain’t no Democrats,” declared one woman, in what sounded like all caps.
A presidency whose base was inspired by a spiritual approach to politics, whose spiritualism promised a complete 180 from George W. Bush’s bloody wars and backward cultural practices, and who seemed transformational at the time, can be subject to exaggeration and projection. All Americans of age have a story about Barack Obama: he is the 9/11 of our political landscape, a seminal change that both changed so much and yet changed so little.
Evaluating Obama as a geopolitical leader demands a strict litmus test, though. How much did his presidency secure his nation state? How much did he stabilize it?
At the end, Obama was less of a transformation geopolitically than a transition: an essential step onto something else not yet realized. Read more
Presidents Barack Obama of the United States and Xi Jinping of China toast during a banquet at the Great Hall of People in Beijing, November 12, 2014 (White House/Pete Souza)
Barack Obama was elected at a time when political anxiety in America was relatively high, particularly among Democratic voters who disliked George W. Bush’s seeming lack of sophistication.
The feeling was that the United States had wasted trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan and thus helped to ruin America’s economy and divert attention away from more serious adversaries like Russia and especially China.
The economic failure was seen as being confirmed by the financial crisis that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers a month or so before the election.
The foreign policy failure was seen as being confirmed by, among other things, Russia’s invasion of Georgia three months before the election, followed one day later by the extravagant opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Read more
Don’t Blame Obama for Everything That Went Wrong in the World
President Barack Obama waits with advisors before a bilateral meeting during the G8 summit at the Lough Erne Resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, June 18, 2013 (White House/Pete Souza)
Looking back on Barack Obama’s presidency, which expires next year, Walter Russell Mead, a centrist observer of American politics, argues in The American Interest that this president has failed to balance “a commitment to human rights and the niceties of American liberal ideology with a strong policy in defense of basic American security interests.”
The result, he argues, is a world “less safe for both human rights and for American security.”
Those are strong words and Mead doesn’t always convince when he tries to back them up. Read more
Republicans Are In No Position to Criticize Obama on Europe
German chancellor Angela Merkel and American president Barack Obama talk at a G7 summit in Bavaria, June 11, 2015 (Bundesregierung)
Barack Obama is no longer revered in Europe, but Politico reminds us that he is still far more popular than his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, was.
Which makes Republican criticism of his European policy a little hard to swallow.
This isn’t just about popularity. When Europe took offense at Bush’s unilateralist, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policy, it had real consequences: France and Germany opposed the Iraq War, leading to the deepest rift in transatlantic relations in decades. It gave new purpose to European defense cooperation outside NATO, which undermined the alliance’s cohesiveness.
Obama has acted multilaterally and more diplomatically. This, too, has had a real impact. Read more
American president Barack Obama takes questions from student reporters at the White House in Washington DC, April 28 (White House/Amanda Lucidon)
Reading Bloomberg Businessweek‘s interview with Barack Obama, I get the sense the president understands the big economic and social challenges of our time but still underestimates the impact of regulation on businesses. Read more
You’re So Vain: Americans and Britain’s EU Referendum
President Barack Obama of the United States and Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom talk at Camp David, Maryland, May 19, 2012 (White House/Pete Souza)
There’s been a tendency the last few days in the United States to make Britain’s EU referendum about America. Commentators are wondering what this will mean for Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions, given that his nativist platform isn’t too dissimilar from the leave campaign in the United Kingdom. They wonder what it effect it will have on transatlantic relations, given Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States.
Some of this is self-indulgent, some of it makes sense.
Perhaps the best reflections on what Britain’s decision to leave the EU means for the United States come from Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest.
He writes that the island nation’s exit is a blow to the West as a whole. Read more
