Andrew J.

Barack Obama: anatomy of a failure

The President is heir to a mistaken sense of America’s place in the world. But he has played a bad hand poorly

President George W. Bush’s place in history is already guaranteed, fixed by a series of monumental blunders that no amount of revisionism will ever be able to whitewash. By comparison, historians are likely to have a hard time drawing a bead on Barack Obama. How could such an obviously gifted President, swept into office on a wave of immense expectations, have managed to accomplish so little in his attempted management of global affairs? Over the past six years ‘Yes, we can!’ has become ‘No, he hasn’t.’ What went wrong?

Several answers to this question present themselves. The first and most important is that the expectations to which Obama–mania gave rise were from the outset utterly unrealistic. But consider this irony: the people who George W. Bush had brought to power eight years prior harboured many of those same expectations regarding the exercise of what pundits and politicians like to call American global leadership.

Bush and his chief lieutenants — people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz — had believed it incumbent on the United States to run the world. The outcome of the Cold War, the central event of their professional lives, had endowed upon the United States the prerogative and the obligation to do just that. America had won and winning had placed America — the sole superpower, the benign global hegemon, the indispensable nation — in charge. It was just that simple.

Those most enthusiastically promoting Obama for the presidency back in 2008 did not, in fact, dispute this interpretation. Their gripe with Bush was that he had exercised the wrong type of leadership. Rather than challenging the triumphalist views that had gained wide currency in the wake of the Cold War, they looked to Obama to undo Bush’s mistakes: end the Iraq War, shut down Guantanamo, and forswear torture, for example.

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