I think the American public tired of this neocon hawkishness and I'm hopeful we see a change in our foreign policy.
Eastern European here. After the fall of the iron curtain, what we really craved for was economic cooperation with the West, liberty of expression and civil and property rights.
Instead, we got US-sponsored liberal NGOs to steer the public opinion in certain directions, NATO military bases to protect us from evil Russia and crappy mass culture in the form of Hollywood movies. It was a great disillusionment for most people.
That's not to deny China as well as Russia take opportunities to push their own visions.
Which NGOs are you talking about? What have these NGOs done to harm the countries?
By the mid 1980s, "perestroychiks" in the Bulgarian communist party had prevailed over the old generation of die-hard communists. Despite officially calling themselves "communists", these people were avid pro-westerners and believers in market economy. One such key figure in Bulgaria was Andrey Lukanov, a minister of foreign trade during that time. When the Berlin wall fell, he headed the first democratic government and remained an influential force until his murdering in 1996.
Andrey Lukanov spoke eloquent English and was actively seeking economic ties and advices from the US. He even went so far to ask two American economy professors to devise a detailed economic plan which would guarantee the optimal transition to a market economy. Even the long-time president and communist dictator Todor Zhivkov officially admitted during his final resignation speech in 1989 that "communism was ill-conceived and we must be welcoming all foreign western capital". The trouble is, western capital didn't come as quickly as expected. We were left with factories and enterprises which were unable to compete with their western counterparts and our market was quickly flooded mostly with foreign goods. Everything else follows from this.
The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire.
Nowadays, we have tens of US-backed NGOs (most notably "Otvoreno Obshtestvo", America for Bulgaria Foundation, Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, etc.) which work very hard to persuade us that gay rights, minority rights and saving the polar bears are the most important problems on our agenda, without ever acknowledging the deep economic problems that cause social tension and emigration.
"The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire." I do not know the situation in Bulgaria, but in the Czech Republic, the enterprises which were bought by the elites and foreign interests were not failing, and several ex-communists have become USD billionaires by having "purchased" them.
I dunno, seemed to last well into Obama's tenure in practice if not in rhetoric, from what I can tell, and Syria may well be a bigger disaster than Afghanistan and Iraq combined by any measure, including realpolitik (see: its effects on European politics, maybe also on the situation in Turkey though I'm less certain on that one). Yes, yes, the war in Iraq contributed to it in certain important ways, but didn't dictate our response to it, which was about as wrong as it could have been, unless there were some serious poker chips in play with Russia that we mere observers couldn't see, i.e. aside from the obvious ones. There's been no widespread condemnation of that action or even common recognition that we're the reason it's such a big mess, as there eventually was in the case of Iraq at least, and incidentally we're still in Iraq and Afghanistan, so neoconservatism seems to be alive and well in some sense.
Mind, I protested the war in Iraq, was overall a fan of Obama's domestic policies, so I'm not a partisan looking for reasons to bash Obama or try to rescue Bush's incredibly poor legacy or anything like that.
Domestically their policies differed a little bit and also Obama was more charismatic, more like B Clinton, in that respect. GW was seen as a buffoon and tool of industry.
[0]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obama-apology-dwb-1.3261009
Most of the U.S. response has been to ISIS in Iraq, which is winding down but can be seen more as more fallout from the Iraq war than anything else.