Obama’s Flawed Foreign Policy

Heather Hurlburt wrote for Democracy Journal about President Obama's foreign policy legacy:

Barack Obama’s foreign policy changed the world permanently, from who has a voice at the UN to who has access to nuclear materials. His eight years in office featured epochal developments over which he had little or no control: the EU’s internal crisis, the Arab Spring, China’s economic slowdown. Yet two things shifted much less over the last eight years—Obama’s core strategy, and Americans’ ability to enunciate in a sentence or two what the strategy is.

We’ve had eight years of listening to Obama foreign policy critiques that, from every ideological quarter, agreed on one thing: The President apparently “just doesn’t understand”—whether it was red lines, allies, opponents, or the persistence of the DC establishment “blob.” Even when it wasn’t coded racism—remember the Romney associate who said claimed that Obama “didn’t fully appreciate the shared history” of the United States and the United Kingdom’s “Anglo-Saxon heritage”?—this view of Obama and his team as at sea in a harsh world is starkly countered by the image Obama and his strongest supporters have sought to instill: that the President is, rather, a chessmaster whose “long game” is often too sophisticated for his critics to grasp.