The Israeli method: destroy their nuclear facilities every time they try to develop them.
What if they develop very hardened, underground facilities, that can’t be destroyed from aerial bombing?
What if the Soviet Uni… er, that is, the Russian Federation tells you that, if you bomb Iran, they will consider that an act of war against an ally? :dubious:
If Hillary had won, Obama would have had a sizeable legacy: climate change and clean energy, Obamacare, the Iran deal, Cuba, education reform, the auto-bailout, financial reform, getting Osama.
Clearly some of that will be reversed, but how much is not clear. I suspect Republicans will find it more difficult and politically costly than they believe right now. In around 10 years we should have a better idea about the long-term impact of Obama’s presidency.
Well, executive orders can be easily reversed, just takes Trump’s pen. Legislation is harder, but ACA is probably going away or will be reformed to comply with actual Republican principles rather than the imagined ones Obama used. Dodd-Frank will probably survive, although that will probably be altered as well.
Probably the only thing the Republican can’t undo is bringing Osama bin Laden back to life. So there’s that.
https://niskanencenter.org/blog/trump-spell-climate-doom/
This piece argues that while the Paris agreement and Clean Power Plan are dead much of the rest of Obama’s environmental legacy will be difficult to repeal.
Good article. They even covered my favorite subject, the nuts and bolts of what it actually takes to implement policy. Without competent leadership, the bureaucracy will act as its own check on Trump, just as ICE stymied Obama on immigration.
Simple solution. The Israelis will be only too happy to do it themselves and the US can deny all prior knowledge of it. (Much like the Russians deny all knowledge of separatist actions in Ukraine).
The world is so simple, and all we need is simple common sense bombings to solve all these simple problems!
That simple solution solved 2 out of 2 of Israel’s nuclear problems.
Which means it can solve every issue related to nukes ever, and there will never be any bad consequences.
Of course not, but it does mean it can work. At least if you have one target whose location is known, as was the case in Iraq and Syria. Obviously Iran is different, so the chances of success are lower. Which is why the Israelis resorted to sabotage and killing nuclear scientists instead.
Maybe it works in the short term, sometimes, but in the long run it just makes it worse. If Iran really wants nukes, they’ll get them, barring anything short of invasion and regime change. More bombings would just harden their resolve.
What Obama has done well: Operation Neptune Spear, pivot to Asia, campaign against ISIS
What Obama did poorly: Social issues, increasing national debt by $9 trillion
I think he’s been a great president; I’m struggling to think of a mis-step, and some of the attempts to do so in this thread just highlight that (e.g. GOP obstructionism was Obama’s fault :rolleyes:)
Stick a pin in this thread. I want to come back to this in 2020 (or 2018).
Even though I’m a Republican, I liked Obama quite a bit and voted for him the second time. I liked that he was a grown-up and thought about things first before jumping into them. I liked that he at least tried to tackle Universal Health Care. I thought he handled the 2008 economic crisis very well. He indicated he would be restrained on going to war.
However, I didn’t like that he was too passive or indecisive on too many international things (and even some domestic stuff). The Syrian red-line thing just drove me up a wall. He was going to do something about the Syrian chemical weapons use, then he thought about it a little too long and backed off, putting egg on our face. Though I think the real issue was that he said the red-line thing, then Congress wouldn’t back him up and he had to back down, but it amounted to the same thing, and then he got Russia involved to take the chemical weapons and they are still there causing issues.
He got involved in Libya, at the urging of Clinton I think, and Qaddafi was successfully overthrown, but then Obama let our allies (Britain and France I think) take care of the cleanup and they failed to follow through, and Obama failed to follow through on making sure things were taken care of. He was too naive about our allies following through on their military commitments.
He seemed too indecisive on Afghanistan. He rightly focused on it after Bush’s Iraq debacle, but he kept vacillating about how many troops to keep in the country and when to pull them out.
On the domestic front, he seemed too naive about how to handle the Republicans obstructing him. It just seemed he was too passive about confronting them for far too long
One other thing on the domestic front: the Democratic Party lost big in the mid-terms, in large part because many of the folks voting for Obama just voted for him and not in the mid-terms and the administration and the party didn’t seem to have a clue how to deal with it. It’s a long term problem with the Democrats but Obama didn’t seem to try to solve it, and now here we are with Trump and a Democratic party in disarray
I subscribe DSYoungEsq’s evaluation of his executive performance.
Including in that the bit about adaher’s comment on race relations and overall social issues. Obama did not create divisiveness, but his merely *being there and saying anything *however mild would be intensified through the lens of everyone’s predisposed views on the issues. He was burdened with an unreasonable set of expectations about how “transformational” and “post racial” he’d be far beyond whatever he may have promised – and not just at home, how about getting a Nobel Peace Prize “preemptively”. Things like this make one wonder if Obama was not a victim (and Hillary would have been) of the “gotta do it twice as well to be thought of half as good” phenomenon that is commonly said to affect minorities and women in various fields they enter.
Because of the same phenomenon of Obama’s vote advantage being personal rather than institutional, the Democratic party stayed largely dominated by the preexisting leadership structures, 8 years after new blood should have been rising up (e.g. to this day Nancy Pelosi remains head of the House Democrats with the seeming undertone that if they ever recover the majority the Speakership is hers by rights. Really, the remnant minority owe their political lives* that much* to her?). Rather than OFA taking over the party apparatus, they allowed the prior establishment to remain as it was because they realized they were not in as position of power to clean house and needed them to hold together the coalition at the presidential level.
She’s an obsessive workaholic and a money-raising machine. So in that sense, she does indeed have a lot of leverage.
I wouldn’t rule out that history might view this achievement in a much more positive light given recent statements of the incoming administration.