Erasing the Obama Foreign Policy Legacy

Among the non-arguments proposed by the unhappy few we have this: Trump’s animosity toward Obama is causing him to undo the Obama legacy, brick by brick, piece by piece. The only reason for Trump's actions, these mindless mavens suggest, is that Obama did it.

By their poor excuse for reasoning, we should keep all elements of the Obama legacy intact… because Obama did them. Keep in mind, the American people, in casting their votes in hundreds of elections, repudiated the Obama legacy throughout the Obama presidency.

Uri Friedman addresses the question in The Atlantic, though he relies far too much on noted Obamaphile flack Ben Rhodes.

He summarizes the Trump wrecking crew:

When Donald Trump last week opted to decertify the nuclear agreement that Barack Obama forged with Iran, it appeared to fit a pattern in the president’s emerging foreign policy. In withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and the Paris climate-change accord, in announcing that he was “canceling” the U.S. opening to Cuba, Trump seemed similarly determined to dismantle Obama’s achievements in international affairs. 

But, it’s not just Trump, Friedman continues. Many Obama policy initiatives were wagers … like the wager on Iranian moderation. Reality has proved these to be bad bets:

But to the extent that Obama’s foreign-policy legacy is under threat, it’s not only Trump that’s doing the threatening. Some accomplishments are fraying for reasons that have nothing to do with the 45th president’s apparent contempt for the 44th. Obama’s legacy partially depends on his bets that certain countries—Cuba, Iran, Burma—would, with time, respond positively to diplomacy, which the former president once described to The Atlantic as “the element of American power that the rest of the world appreciates unambiguously.”

Strangely enough, Friedman suggests that the Trump war against ISIS is just a continuation of the Obama war against ISIS. He does not seem to recall that ISIS arose and prospered under the Obama presidency and that the former president exhibited his signature cowardice when confronting it.

On Monday the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa fell. Clearly, it was yet another Trumpian effort to undo the Obama legacy. Obama’s flacks and flunkies were not running around explaining that Trump had wanted to destroy ISIS because he held Obama in contempt. They preferred, in the media, to portray it as a defeat. After all, we cannot have it that Trump might look like he was succeeding, can we?

It took special talents with spin to make victory in Raqqa look like a defeat, but the New York Times was up to the challenge in its news analysis (via Maggie’sFarm):

Its de facto capital is falling. Its territory has shriveled from the size of Portugal to a handful of outposts. Its surviving leaders are on the run.

But rather than declare the Islamic State and its virulent ideology conquered, many Western and Arab counterterrorism officials are bracing for a new, lethal incarnation of the jihadist group.

The organization has a proven track record as an insurgency able to withstand major military onslaughts, while still recruiting adherents around the world ready to kill in its name.

Islamic State leaders signaled more than a year ago that they had drawn up contingency plans to revert to their roots as a guerrilla force after the loss of their territory in Iraq and Syria. Nor does the group need to govern cities to inspire so-called lone wolf terrorist attacks abroad, a strategy it has already adopted to devastating effect in Manchester, England, and Orlando, Fla.

I do not quite see how it happened, but the Times neglected to mention that jihadis far and wide were drawn to ISIS because it looked like it was winning, winning in Mosul, winning in Syria. Obama’s pusillanimous withdrawal from the region empowered ISIS and inspired jihadis in Europe and America.

The Associated Press echoes the Times worry that defeat is really a victory:

Over several nights in September, some 10,000 men, women and children fled areas under Islamic State control, hurrying through fields in northern Syria and risking fire from government troops to reach a province held by an al-Qaida-linked group.

For an untold number of battle-hardened jihadis fleeing with the civilians, the escape to Idlib province marked a homecoming of sorts, an opportunity to continue waging war alongside an extremist group that shares much of the Islamic State's ideology — and has benefited from its prolonged downfall.

While the U.S.-led coalition and Russian-backed Syrian troops have been focused on driving IS from the country's east, an al-Qaida-linked insurgent coalition known as the Levant Liberation Committee has consolidated its control over Idlib, and may be looking to return to Osama bin Laden's strategy of attacking the West.

For those bemoaning the erasure of the Obama foreign policy, it’s yet another occasion for anguish and anger.