I wrote earlier about the mess in Syria and how it’s Barack Obama’s fault. But that’s not the only thing that is his fault; actually, everything is.
Many historians believe that the events of any time are the fruits of the decisions made in the previous decade. This is not a stretch. In the 1990s, we decided to ignore the rise of the Taliban to power. In the next decade, 9/11 happened.
Or in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan decided to change U.S. policy and put pressure on the Soviet Union to bankrupt them. The Soviet Union collapsed in the next decade, and America won the Cold War.
And in the 1920s, Europe was in crisis over the future of Germany and rearmament. Europeans didn’t trust each other, but they all trusted America, which was occupying Rhineland. But President Warren Harding decided to end the U.S. occupation in Germany despite opposition from all sides, including Germany, and brought the military back home. This decision might be the most catastrophic U.S. foreign policy decision as it set the stage for World War II to happen in the next decade.
This brings us to Obama, who is the worst foreign policy president since Harding. The world is the most unstable since World War II.
There is a war in Europe.
There is another war in the Middle East.
The Houthis started a war in the Red Sea, which the U.S. military entered and is losing. (Despite Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s lie that the U.S. military is not in any war right now, though it’s understandable that they’d like people to forget that they entered a war and lost it within mere months.)
China has been the most aggressive in decades. Iran is closer than ever to nuclear weapons and openly shooting at its neighbors.
And the Taliban are back in power plotting against America.
The civil war in Syria finally ended. The Iran-backed regime is out, and a new regime backed by Turkey and Qatar, led by a former al-Qaeda commander, is in. Up in the north, Turkey is fighting America’s Kurdish allies who hold 15,000 Islamic State terrorists in their prisons, and, if the Kurds lose, those prisoners could go free. What could go wrong?
These aren’t entirely Obama’s fault, but he is by far the most responsible.
Let’s start with Russia. In 2014, Vladimir Putin annexed Ukrainian Crimea and started a war in eastern Ukraine. At the time, almost everyone in the Obama administration believed that we should have helped Ukraine. But Obama had other ideas. He thought that Ukraine was a core interest of Russia but not America’s. So he let Russia have it. The only help he sent to Ukraine was blankets and helmets!
All of this emboldened Putin to think that he could get away even with more, which is why he decided to go for the rest of Ukraine in 2022. Even Biden agrees. He told Bob Woodward:
That’s why we are here. We f–ked it up. Barack never took Putin seriously.
Moving on to the Middle East, Obama made three important decisions in his first term.
First, he decided to withdraw our troops from Iraq.
Second, he decided not to help the secular Syrian revolutionaries.
These two decisions led to the rise of the Islamic State and chaos in Iraq and Syria. Iran took advantage of the situation. It expanded its proxy network. Also, for the first time in a century, it deployed its military far beyond its borders to permanently station it in other countries and by Israel’s borders. Russia also deployed its military to the Middle East for the first time in half a century. Turkey also deployed its military to crack down on Kurds. All of this chaos was because Obama decided not to do anything.
Half a million innocent people perished in the civil war. Several millions were displaced. A refugee crisis spilled into Europe and has disrupted European politics for a decade now as a result.
And nothing could change Obama’s mind—not even his own cabinet who insisted on helping the Syrian revolutionaries. Obama had drawn a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons by Syria. But after the Syrian government gassed its own people, Obama decided to let it go. This told our enemies that America simply had lost its gut, and they became more emboldened.
Third, he was desperate to get out of Afghanistan, but that was politically inconvenient. So, he decided to prove that the war was unwinnable. He announced a surge but set it up for failure by announcing that it would end regardless of the outcome within two years. Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt came out after the Normandy landing and said “Fyi, Hitler, we’re leaving Europe in two years no matter what!” And when his strategy failed, through his media surrogates, he convinced Americans that the war was unwinnable, evident by his own failure. (Because if the great Barack Obama couldn’t do it, nobody could!)
Obama shrewdly convinced Americans that we could never win in Afghanistan. This made it politically convenient to campaign against the war. Because of this, we ended up actually losing the war. The guys who plotted 9/11 are now back in power plotting again.
Iran was the core of Obama’s policy. He thought that the best way to stabilize the region was by creating a balance of power between Iran and Saudi Arabia. He thought that America needed to be less tight with Saudi Arabia—an imperfect but reliable partner—and friendlier to Iran. The core of his foreign policy was lifting the sanctions on Iran and giving money to Iran to empower it against Saudi Arabia and weakening the Saudis by being tougher on them. Now, you might think that this is lunacy, and you’re right. But this is a respected academic theory, which is why you shouldn’t listen to ivory-tower academics on how to run the world. Except that Obama loves ivory-tower academics.
Obama didn’t just give Iran a quarter of its GDP in cash in addition to lifting sanctions. He also ignored Iran’s growing proxy network. In fact, the money he gave Iran helped them strengthen the network, also thanks to the chaos in Syria and Iraq.
Also, when a bunch of ragtags overthrew the government in Yemen, Obama was blindsided, but he also did nothing to stop them. Who cares about Yemen, right? Well, Iran does. Those ragtags are the Houthis, who are now an ally of Iran. They came to power in 2014 under Obama. Ten years later, they have become so strong that they have changed the shape of global trade.
Iran also increased its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, thanks to the money Obama gave Iran and the free hand he let them have. Hezbollah also became stronger by entering the civil war in Syria. It became so rich and powerful from fighting in Syria that it practically controlled the entire state of Lebanon at some point. Obama also didn’t allow Israel to do anything about Hamas. Every time Hamas attacked Israel, after a few weeks, Obama told them to knock it off.
Supported by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah became so powerful that they eventually started this war that has destabilized the Middle East more than any time in decades.
Last, Obama also emboldened the Chinese. He had told Xi Jinping that they were not allowed to militarize the South China Sea, and Xi promised not to do it. But China did militarize the South China Sea, and Obama did nothing. China had tested America for the first time since the 1980s when it began its rise, and America failed the test.
Also, as China was building up its military, Obama was downsizing ours. As China was threatening our allies, Obama was undermining them and calling them names. But more important than anything was Obama’s decision not to enforce his own red line in Syria. Off the record, all Asian allies complain that nothing encouraged China to become so aggressive more than his cowardice in Syria.
No president is flawless, and not everything bad in the world is Obama’s fault. We can go through every president one by one and talk about what they did wrong.
But over the last century, no president did more to undermine world peace more than Obama. Ironically, he’s the only one with a Nobel Peace Prize!
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
