Obama’s hope changed to division and withdrawal

The outgoing US President helped revive a stumbling economy but diluted and failed to assert US authority.

Barack Obama should be forgiven for using his farewell address to put the best possible spin on what he sees as his legacy of solid achievement during his eight years in the White House. That’s what US presidents do when they leave office and only the most churlish would do other than concede Mr Obama, with his soaring rhetorical skills, did well in seeking to make the case. But the trouble is that even his outstanding ability as an orator cannot disguise the reality that his presidency, born amid such enormous hope and goodwill as the first African-American leader of the world’s most powerful nation, has not lived up to expectations.

Achievements there have been, as with his success in reviving the US economy after the global financial crisis, the rebooting of the car industry and the longest period of sustained job creation in US history. And he showed strong leadership in eliminating Osama bin Laden and much of al-Qa’ida’s command structure. But the flip side is seen in the reality that after two terms of Mr Obama, Americans are more divided and rancorous than when he arrived in the Oval Office. They have voted decisively for a successor, Donald Trump, who is determined to repudiate and dismantle just about all of the outgoing President’s agenda. Mr Obama tried hard to win the election for Hillary Clinton. But voters turned their backs on more of the same and embraced someone so diametrically different that it provides a telling epitaph for his administration.

Even before he is sworn in next week, Mr Trump has lined up pivotal Obama “successes” such as Obamacare and the global pact on climate change for the chop by the new Republican-controlled congress. “We’ve led the world to an agreement that (has) the promise to save this planet,” Mr Obama boasted in his farewell, echoing his promise eight years ago to “heal the planet”. But, like many of the other achievements he claims, this deal is likely to prove short-lived. The trouble with Mr Obama is, though he came to office amid such immense goodwill (and leaves it with an approval rating of 52 per cent), he proved to be a polarising President who, in his pursuit of a progressive domestic agenda, especially on pivotal issues such as Obamacare, showed a stubborn unwillingness to embrace the bipartisanship needed to achieve legislative success. By rejecting the hard work of building political consensus, as The Wall Street Journal has noted, Mr Obama built much of the legacy he now claims for himself on sand. His agenda failed to deliver on its core promise of “economic fairness”, so it has caused disenchantment in Middle America and fuelled the rise of Mr Trump on the back of issues such as immigration, jobs being sent abroad and global trade.

As much as the Obama legacy has been disappointing on domestic issues, however, it has been worse on foreign policy. In his farewell address he spoke of opening up a new chapter with the Cuban people, shutting down Iran’s nuclear weapons program without a shot being fired, and securing America so “no foreign terrorist organisation has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland these past eight years”. The other side of the coin looks different. When the Cold War ended, Moscow was in retreat globally. As Mr Obama leaves office, the wins of the post-Cold War era are being rapidly eroded, overtaken by a new, revanchist Russia under Vladimir Putin, who consistently has outplayed the US leader in crucial areas such as the Middle East and Ukraine.

Mr Obama takes pride in reducing America’s global involvement and bringing home US troops. But this retreat has come at a terrible cost, as in his cynical, electorally driven decision before the 2012 presidential poll to pull all US troops out of Iraq on the basis that “the tide of war is receding”. That decision allowed the emergence of Islamic State and the horrendous six years of carnage and misery in Syria. It was a decision as misguided and ill-conceived as his later dithering over “red lines” in Syria that effectively opened the door to Russia supplanting the US as the main Middle East power. Mr Obama claims to have thwarted Tehran’s nuclear weapons program but that is, at best, uncertain and unlikely to be known for years. The deal freed up billions of dollars that Iran’s ayatollahs have used to fund their terrorist proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq as part of the drive to expand Shia influence. At the same time, via the UN, Mr Obama has weakened US support for Israel.

In our own region, too, Mr Obama has disappointed: his strategic “pivot” to Asia, announced in Canberra, remains largely unfulfilled, with China bristling and flexing muscle throughout the region. His promise to work towards a nuclear-free world looks threadbare, with North Korea and Pakistan thumbing their noses at Washington’s injunctions and Mr Putin revamping Russian stockpiles. In summary, Mr Obama has pulled America back from the world, diminishing US authority. This can be only detrimental to those people and nations who value freedom.