Sam: would you please tell the class how the recently negotiated START nuclear reduction treaty is a failure?
Also, how big a failure was it for the Obama Administration to reject a demand from the Japanese government to remove our troops from our most important strategic base in the Far East? Is that a large failure, a huge failure, or an enormous failure?
I think the removal of troops from Iraq, which is proceeding along the timeline established last year, is also a failure. I’m not sure why, but it must be. But this failure, for whatever reasons, is certainly greater than the failure in the G20 summit. It simply has to be a big, big failure.
For that matter, adding troops to Afghanistan is also a failure. I guess it was a failure to fire the last US commander in Afghanistan, who was also failing at his job. Also, Obama failed by providing more troops to Afghanistan, and he also failed to provide enough troops to Afghanistan; and not promising to pull troops out of Afghanistan was one failure that would have been compounded by actually pulling troops out of Afghanistan — hoo, boy, would THAT have been a failure!
Even accepting all your generous assessments of Bush’s successes at face value, has it occurred to you that you’re comparing a time period of eight years with one of eighteen months here?
Hang on… I’m not blaming Obama for Afghanistan not improving. I’m saying that HIS CLAIM of being able to improve things through his approach to foreign policy has not worked as he said it would. Absolutely Afghanistan is a mess, and I have no idea how to solve it. But Obama did claim to have the answers. He was going to pull troops out of Iraq and re-focus on Afghanistan. He was going to re-engage with Muslim radicals and convince them America wasn’t the enemy, which was going to stabilize the region. That didn’t happen.
But it has gotten worse, and some of that is due to explicit Obama policies. But I’m still not going to blame him for that, because I don’t have any better answers. For example, his increasing of Predator strikes in Pakistan has whacked a lot of really bad guys, which I think is a good thing. But it’s also destabilizing Pakistan. So is that policy right or wrong? Damned if I know. So I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that.
Bush built a large “coalition” for Iraq? Apart from Britain this was mostly a sham. Governments sent token forces against the popular opinion in their countries. This wasn’t a free lunch for the US; basically it drew down much of the goodwill it had earned over the decades for a useless war.
And the war itself was a staggering failure. The US spent an enormous amount of resources fighting a largely non-existent threat. It greatly damaged its credibility by hawking bogus WMD claims. It strengthened Iran by removing its biggest enemy and putting friendly Shiite groups in power in Iraq. And it diverted resources and attention from the Afghanistan war which has steadily deteriorated into a near insoluble quagmire which Obama now has to clean up. Iraq was the central foreign policy decision of Bush’s presidency and it was one of the biggest failures in US history.
Except maybe for North Korea which IMO is the great underrated disaster of Bush’s tenure, perhaps even worse than Iraq. Basically Bush had inherited a flawed but working framework which had succeeded in keeping North Korea from going nuclear. He ended it but put nothing in its place. He blustered and postured but North Korea crossed one “red line” after another without any serious action by Bush. The end result is that North Korea is effectively a nuclear power and it’s going to be a lot more difficult to reverse that than it was to prevent it from happening in the first. Yet another monumental display of ideologically inspired incompetence.
As for Obama I am not happy with all of his foreign policy. I think he has been too lenient with Israel though I recognize that he faces serious constraints in terms of the Israel lobby. It’s a major structural problem in US foreign policy and not something he can change quickly. However overall he has done a decent job with an enormously difficult set of problems left by his predecessor. Not just the foreign policy messes but the economic crisis which greatly undermined the credibility of the US economic model and damaged its prestige.
Yep. So let’s look at Bush’s first 18 months. He successfully defused the Chinese crisis, he started a major AIDS program in Africa, started building new economic and military ties in Eastern Europe and South America, and he assembled a global coalition and overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan. Not bad.
And if Obama’s foreign policy starts to register serious successes, I’ll give him credit for it. I’ll give him credit for START, even though I think it’s the wrong policy, because he doesn’t think so and he did get what he wants. So let’s put START in the ‘win’ column for him.
Oh and I am not sure where you are getting this stuff. The major WTO initiative during Bush's term was the Doha round which was a failure particularly over the central issue of agricultural subsidies which Bush, like most US politicians, supports. And Bush imposed steel tariffs in 2002 and refused to back even after the WTO ruled against them. It was only after the EU threatened to retaliate that he reversed course. Bush was hardly a stalwart free trader.
Given your incredible concern for health related funding in Africa, how come I haven’t seen you include Obama’s $63 billion Global Health Initiative as a win?
[Aside: It’s really hard, by the way, to put much credence in your post-Bush arguments that you weren’t anything but Bush’s Boy for 8 years on the SDMB with threads like this one.]
And what about the failure regarding Okinawa? The new Japanese government wanted to close the base there. The United States said that was a stupid idea. In a massive failure for Obama, the Japanese government conceded that it was indeed a stupid idea to close the base, and then collapsed because they dared propose something so stupid and had to admit it.
Obama really screwed the pooch on that one. I suppose he should have closed the base and made the failed Japanese government look good. How he could cause an inexperienced Japanese Prime Minister to lose face is such a failure!
Fair enough, with the caveat that I don’t think he ever claimed it was all going to come together in the first 18 months.
I think your next step here is to ask a mod to correct your thread title from the hyperbolic and deliberately inflammatory “Obama’s Foreign Policy is an Utter Failure” to “Obama’s Foreign Policy So Far is Less Successful than his Campaign Promises Predicted”.
Well, by that metric, Obama also gets credit for “starting to build new economic ties” in the Asia-Pacific region with the Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks.
You forgot to include “failed to prevent a catastrophic foreign terrorist attack on US soil”. After all, if Bush deserves foreign policy credit for responding to 9/11, he also deserves to take responsibility for ignoring the warning signs that might have forestalled 9/11.
To be fair to Obama,. he’s been busy pushing the health care thing thru. And Iraq seems to be going better, although that could be mostly that it is regarded differently now that Obama is going to be responsible for it.
But yeah, he’s been about as weak as someone with his lack of national and military experience would be expected to be. The real crunch will be dealing with the Axis of Evil nations (the ones that are still dangerous).
A little bit of limited credit for Bush. But there are a lot of Muslims in Africa. No help there. Increased piracy, worsening economies. Greatly improved - laughable. Obama’s election did more for opinions of America in Africa. Nothing Obama did himself though.
For what purpose? And where is it now? Afghanistan is one of the many immense Bush failures.
So a couple of other countries gave half-hearted support. Big deal. It wasn’t a large coalition like George the First put together, and it has nearly bankrupted the country, not to mention the death toll, and the way it has strengthened Iran.
Again some small credit. But Libya has not been a major threat for years, and their WMD program was about as dangerous as Sadaam’s.
Held what? India and Pakistan weren’t at war beforehand. There is no perceptible change in the relationship between those countries. And it has all come for huge price tag.
The Bush bungling in N. Korea is monumental leaving the Korean peninsula on the verge of war, while N. Koreans die of starvation, and flat out murder.
Huh? More bungling. Eastern Europe doesn’t trust us to protect them from Russia anymore.
Can’t you do a better job of making things up? We don’t have stronger ties there. Japan wants our military bases out. S. Korea thinks the Bush war failures left us unable to help them. And Japan thinks we are dumber than ever for electing him president.
Bush created the crisis through his incompetence, and did nothing to improve the situations. Luckily cooler heads took him out of the loop and kow-towed to the Chinese, leaving us weaker.
Yes, I sleep better knowing about that huge trade deal with the Dominicans. And its wonderful that we’ve continued increasing the trade gap that works against us.
Oh yeah, I forgot how Columbia is the crown jewel of S. America now.