Obama Years: Foreign Policy Disaster

When President Obama took office in 2009, he had very little concern for foreign policy.  Riding a wave of popularity in the press and having spent his career as a “community organizer” and with his first foray into politics was as senator in Illinois in 2005, international affairs was not a priority for him.  His approach therefore seems consistent with the idea to avoid and disengage wherever he could so he could focus on his crusade to “fundamentally change America” from the inside.  He saw US foreign involvement as an expense waste of resources that he could redeploy towards bigger government programs domestically.  Obama therefore sought short-term, easy solutions to foreign policy conundrums.

Here is a list of well-documented foreign policy failures of the Obama administration:

• Obama withdrew all US troops out of Iraq in 20011.  Almost immediately, ISIS/ISIL took over the power vacuum left by the US troops and established its caliphate in Mosul after chasing away the Iraqi army.  This resulted in a new expansion of the civil wars in Iraq and Syria.

• When the Syria civil was raging in 2011, Obama had no significant public stand on the war.  However, when it was alleged that President Assad of Syria used chemical weapons against rebels, Obama publicly stated that the use of chemical weapon was a “red line” that Assad should not cross.  However, at the next report of chemical weapons being used against civilians, Obama went silent and took no overt action thus enabling a further escalation of the war by empowering Assad.  Up to a million Syrian refugees fled their country of birth.

• Obama sought to support rebels seeking to overthrow President Assad by sending them weapons.  Obama publicly defended his position as the right thing to do to help the people defend themselves.  When reports that the weapons were being sent to islamic extremists in the form of ISIS, Obama continued to defend his actions saying the ISIS is nothing more than freedom fighters seeking to liberate their country.  That is until ISIS began its campaign of publicly beheading people to include Americans on national TV, that was when Obama went silent and the Syrian war continues to this day albeit with Assad and his Russian allies winning the ground war.

• When President Mubarak of Egypt was overthrown in 2011, Obama congratulated the Egyptian people and then promised aid funding to the Muslim Brotherhood which had taken control of Egypt using rigged elections schemes.  A short while later, the Muslim Brotherhood was itself overthrown in a second popular uprising assisted by the Egyptian military but this time the Obama administration froze foreign aid and demanded the reinstatement of the Muslim Brotherhood.

• When the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya was attacked in 2012 and the US ambassador was killed, Obama and Hillary jointly found a strange excuse to say that the attack was inspired by some home-movie made by an unknown producer in the US which insulted Mohammed.  When the facts came out that the attack on the embassy was planned long before the home movie was ever heard of on the internet, Obama and his cheerleaders in the domestic media fell silent.

• Obama makes a deal with the regime in Iran that it would give some vague promise to stop its development of nuclear weapons and four Americans in Iranian jail in exchange for money.  It was confirmed that an unmarked cargo plan carrying $400 million dollars landed in Iran shortly after Iran freed the four Americans and later it was confirmed that a total of $2 billion dollars was given to the Iranians.  Again this demonstrates the complete lack of interest on the part of Obama as to whether or not the Iranians ever intended to follow through with its promises.  Turns out as soon as the planeloads of money landed in Iran, the regime went back to work on nuclear weapons but now with extra funding to make more bombs.

• In the eight years of the Obama administration, Obama took a personal dislike to Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and even went as far as to fly to Israel and give speeches that encouraged people not to vote for Netanyahu.  By most accounts this stems from Obama’s desire to develop relations with Iran and Netanyahu’s insistence that Iran cannot be bargained with.  Of course Netanyahu gets elected and Obama refused to meet with him as a head of state on several occasions.

These are just some of the more obvious foreign policy failures of the Obama administration.