16-day journey
The arrival of a freight train at Barking, east London, signalled a new chapter in the history of the centuries-old Silk Road trading route. The East Wind train pulled up at its destination, after a 16-day journey, to become the first direct freight train linking China and Britain. Its 34 wagon travelled 12,000km — making it arguably the longest train journey in the world. After setting out from the Chinese industrial city of Yiwu, the East Wind train crossed Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France.
As Barack Obama packs up his belongings and prepares to not be president anymore, the postmortems and assessments of his Administration are coming in at a rapid pace.
His record is quite significant for both good and bad reasons.
Let’s start with the good: I don’t think even foreign policy folks remember just how bleak America’s position in the world appeared to be in January 2009. The outgoing president was spectacularly unpopular. In the preceding few months, the worst financial crisis in a century had hit the acute phase. The US economy was shrinking by about 8 per cent. Lots of foreign observers, and lots of American observers, too, were writing the obituary for American leadership in the world. Beijing was on the rise, and the looming power transition seemed to augur poorly for American interests.
After two Obama terms, the US was looked upon more favourably in most (although not all) parts of the globe, and perceptions of American economic power returned to pre2008 levels. Americans themselves have greater confidence in the relative power of the US economy than at any time in the post-2008 era.
I would also argue that Obama’s grand strategic principle — that the US needed to rebalance away from the Middle East to focus more on the Pacific Rim — was basically sound. This led to both the Iranian nuclear deal and the bilateral climate change deal with China that paved the way for the Paris accords. These are not insignificant advances on issue areas that, in 2008, were best described as “intractable” or “unsolvable”. It also, however, led to a de-emphasis on issues such as human rights.
Obama’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness as a foreign policy leader was his Zen-master approach to world politics. Obama refused to panic and always took the long view. Obama always kept his eyes on the prize. He did not always keep his eyes on the politics, and that turned out to be a much bigger problem for US foreign policy than he and his defenders realised.
The best way to think about Obama is that he was the Jon Snow of foreign policy. As Lord Commander in Game of Thrones, Snow correctly perceived the biggest threat to Westeros (the White Walkers) and the best strategy to cope with that threat (bringing as many wildlings south of the Wall as possible).
And for these decisions, he was murdered by members of his own Night’s Watch.
Actor Kit Harington shrewdly assessed Snow’s leadership abilities to Entertainment Weekly and why, despite the character’s leadership qualities, he got killed for his troubles: US President Barack Obama in 2010 with his daughters in Washington. Kit Harington, below, as Jon Snow. “There’s a huge amount of fault. He hasn’t paid attention to the people around him. He’s only looked at the big picture . . . All he could really see is this impending doom by the White Walkers and doing things for the greater good, and what he was missing was Olly and [Ser Alliser] Thorne and some of the men around him. He wasn’t seeing their discontent and dealing with the smaller issues. And because of that, he’s served justice. Olly puts the last dagger in him. In that moment I think he realises that he didn’t look after his kin, this young man, and let him down.”
This is a fair autopsy of Snow’s strengths and weaknesses as a leader; I’d suggest it applies to Obama as well. He always seemed baffled when great powers such as Russia took steps that seemed at odds with how Obama calculated their interests. His expectation was that revisionist behaviour would be selfdefeating in the long run. He might be right about that, but sometimes the short run can alter the future in more permanent ways than the outgoing President appreciated.
This ties back into the one way in which any assessment of Obama’s foreign policy legacy mirrors any assessment of his domestic policy legacy: the man who is replacing him. Another big theme of Obama’s presidency was the notion that nationbuilding started at home. For reasons partially but not entirely of his own making, however, the President learned to embrace executive power in his second term. He now bequeaths those powers to an incoming president who is undisciplined and only dimly aware of what he can and cannot do as president.
Obama is a patient man, and would no doubt argue that Trump’s illiberal behaviour will eventually be self-defeating. But as Jonathan Kirshner noted in the LA Review of Books, one aspect of Trump’s election is irreversible: “Even if we manage to endure the next four years and then oust him in the next election, from this point forward we will always be the country that elected Donald Trump as President. ... Trump can start a trade war or provoke an international crisis just by tweeting executive orders from the White House. And that damage will prove irreversible. Because from now on, and for a very long time, countries around the world will have to calculate their interests, expectations, and behaviour with the understanding that this is America, or, at the very least, that this is what the American political system can plausibly produce. And so the election of Trump will come to mark the end of the international order that was built to avoid repeating the catastrophes of the first half the twentieth century, and which did so successfully — horrors that we like to imagine we have outgrown. It will not serve us well.”
Obama was more of a restorationist president than his critics realised. He came in at a low point in American power and influence in the world and helped to make America great again. But his inattention and disdain for the politics of his job laid the groundwork for an incoming president who can tear down the very order that Obama fought hard to preserve. I hope Obama proves to be right about the long arc of history. But I fear he has been wrong too many times during his presidency for me to have that much hope for the immediate future of America in the world.
- Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts University