Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

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FWIW, I don't think Obama has been any more effective in foreign policy than Bush. Obama's biggest failure is that he makes very big, lofty rhetoric, yet is unable to fulfill that rhetoric with effective action. Examples:

* Nuclear disarmament (you know, what he ostensibly got his Nobel peace prize for)... yeah, that's firmly dead in the water.

* The big Muslim reconcilation (his big speech in Cairo in 2009)... post-Arab Spring, there's a lot of disillusionment in the Muslim world considering that actions haven't matched up to those words.

* Syria's chemical weapons, wherein Obama threatened heavy repercussions should Syria use them in its civil war. Said heavy repercussions turned out to be merely exporting those weapons and not even anything so hefty as extracting an admission of guilt or instituting a trial in the ICC or ICJ over their use.

* The Asian pivot, whose biggest practical effect has been to cause allies to question America's willingness to uphold its own commitments.

* The Russian "reset"... okay, this one is Putin's fault. :-)

You can argue that, in many respects, Obama is/was constrained by public opinion, but that's just the mark of the most common failure of politicians: the politicians whose names echo through history are not the ones who follow public opinion, but the ones who lead it.

Great rhetoric with no action is still way better than terrible rhetoric backed up by force. Bush's foreign policy was a complete disaster. Accomplishing nothing would be a tremendous improvement by comparison.

The problem, though, is that some of Obama's accomplishments aren't "accomplishing nothing"--they're accomplishing bad things. In particular, the "red line" in Syria and the (effective) capitulation to Russia over Ukraine feel eerily similar to the run-up to WWII, where the Allies capitulated to Hitler rather than go to war and ended up going to war when Germany was a lot stronger and harder to counter. In contrast, the situation of the Cuban missile crisis was resolved in large part by JFK refusing to let the USSR declare a new normal.

As a thought experiment, do you think that Putin would have attempted to dislodge Crimea from Ukraine or Assad would have used chemical weapons had Bush still been in power? If you're tempted to answer "no," then that is a success of Bush's foreign policy. But if words will never be backed up with power, then words are just words and can be safely ignored.

Putin didn't have a problem invading Georgia on Bush's watch. North Korea didn't have any problem letting off nukes either. Saddam didn't have any problem letting of chemical weapons during Reagan.

Georgia fucked up by invading thier breakaway regions. Putin had massive justification to invade/defend, unlike in Ukraine which was an opportunistic land grab

Those weren't nukes, they were gigantic piles of TNT big enough to eff with telemetry systems

I agree that some of Obama's accomplishments were negative.

But none of them came anywhere close to the debacle of Iraq. The "red line" nonsense was definitely bad. Making big declarations and ignoring them is not smart. But it's not even on the same level as invading a sovereign nation, getting a million or so people killed, and wasting an unimaginable amount of money for no reason.

I don't know that Ukraine qualifies as bad US foreign policy. We don't really have a responsibility there. (Contrary to the popular rhetoric on the internet, the treaty under which Ukraine gave up their Soviet-era nuclear weapons merely required the signatories to respect Ukrainian sovereignty, not guarantee it. Russia is violating that treaty, but the treaty does not require the US to assist.)

Would Assad have used chemical weapons had Bush still been in power? Maybe not. But seeing as how Bush is responsible for the whole regional mess in the first place, that hardly seems like plus on his side.

Would Russia have taken Crimea if Bush were still in power? I don't see why not. Not only did Bush waste a ton of lives and money, he also set the precedent that he would ignore any country capable of actually resisting. He invaded Iraq for imaginary WMDs, but ignored North Korea's actual WMDs even though they were a part of the "axis of evil." Russia has even more WMDs than North Korea and I imagine they would be confident that nothing would be done.

That's an easy thought experiment, because it doesn't matter which president you ask that supposition about - neither of those things would not have been avoided due to a saber rattling president.

After more than a decade of the US being involved in a mistaken invasion, we, as a nation, are war weary. Without a serious issue within our borders, the US simply will not do it. Every analyst, both in the US and outside, knows that.

I personally think the "red line" thing was mostly good PR for the anti-Obama politicians. I don't think it had any real impact on our foreign policy. The words the President used weren't, as so often claimed, "If Syria uses chemical weapons, we'll invade". He said, quoting him from his comments on Aug. 20, 2012; "We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation." By the time we knew that chemical weapons had been used, many other things had also happened, too, so the "equation" had a lot of new variables.

Nuclear disarmament...

The deal with Iran isn't exactly disarmament, but it's somewhere in the same ballpark at least.

Assuming it doesn't fail, but I feel that the Iran deal with Obamacare, and the NSA leaks will be the things we will associate with Obama in the future. That and that he's black.

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