Barack Obama’s presidency was a tumultuous one. Obama was challenged by almost unprecedented domestic difficulties and a deeply divided Congress as well as by increasing global instability and turmoil. He nevertheless retained high personal popularity ratings during most of his two terms. To a significant extent this was due to his superior personal conduct as a political leader and indeed as a husband and father. Obama came across as honorable, trustworthy, reflective and dignified insofar as his years in office were not tainted by any salacious scandals or irresponsible personal behavior. His inclination, however, to surround himself with celebrities, be they intellectuals or entertainers, and his personal self-assuredness if not arrogance were responsible for an air of aloofness and detachment that permeated the Obama White House.

Obama had the sheer good fortune that he was bound to look like a mature and graceful statesman in comparison with his predecessor, the discredited and bungling George W. Bush. He also has the distinction of going down in history as the first non-white president and as someone who did not drag his country into any major new ground wars. Domestically he doggedly stood up to all the hatred and barely concealed racism that he faced throughout his eight years in office. Considering the deeply hostile Congress and the huge global and domestic challenges Obama was faced with, at first sight his presidential record is formidable though perhaps less so when looking at the issues more closely.

Immediately upon coming to office Obama managed to deal successfully with the near meltdown of the American financial system. By means of a major economic stimulus program and the re-capitalization of a number of large banks and financial institutions, his administration and the Federal Reserve prevented the implosion of America’s economy and the country’s banking system. In March 2010 Obama was also able to get a partial health care reform act through a gridlocked Congress. This was a massive success. Although his solution was far from perfect and allowed private insurance companies to retain too much influence, all previous presidents had failed when attempting to introduce something approximating a universal health care system in the United States.

Obama also scored some major foreign policy successes. Still, the balance sheet for his foreign policy is a mixed one as outlined below. Despite some successful initiatives the Obama administration left unresolved many of the crucial foreign policy issues of our times.

Obama’s World View

It is difficult to discern Obama’s worldview. Some of the best recent indicators are included in Jeffrey Greenberg’s June 2016 article in the Atlantic which is based on a number of long interviews with the president. Initially Obama can be characterized as quite idealistic. In his first year as president he optimistically pronounced his desire to rid the world of all nuclear weapons, believed that a “reset” of U.S. policy with Russia would be quite possible and that perhaps a good democratic government could be installed in Libya after the downfall of Gaddafi. After a few years however Obama became increasingly cynical, realized the domestic and international constraints on his power and soon came to believe in a much more neo-realist conception of America’s role in global affairs. The president certainly moved toward a much more pragmatic approach, preferring to focus on the merely “doable” rather than on the desirable objectives.

Obama shared the long-standing belief of the Washington foreign policy establishment that the United States is the “indispensable” country in global affairs. Obama, like many of his compatriots, views America as the benign hegemon, who, by means of a cooperative multilateral approach and based on the democratic and enlightenment values of the West, is essentially a good and well-meaning power which only uses force and coercion when there is no other option left. Obama, however, stopped viewing the United States as the world’s omnipotent policeman. This, he believed, would overstretch the country’s resources. Even more importantly, in Obama’s view, no country can possibly fulfill such a role with respect to the ever more complex and intricate global problems the world of the twenty-first century is faced with. Consequently, Obama decided to focus U.S. foreign policy on those issues that were absolutely essential for America and the West’s future well-being while sidelining the others. On the whole, though not always, the president managed to stick to his core principle of a limited role for U.S. foreign policy.

The Obama administration pursued six major foreign policy objectives:

1. Ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

During the election campaign of 2008, Obama promised to terminate the country’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was largely achieved by December 2011 and late 2014 respectively though at a high price. A small number of American troops (just under 9 thousand) remain in Afghanistan to date. More importantly, both countries continue to be highly unstable and are increasingly escaping from U.S. and western influence. In Afghanistan, in particular outside Kabul, the Taliban with their austere, fundamentalist pre-modern approach to life essentially are once again the rulers of the land. Iraq is drawn increasingly into the orbit of Iran, which remains one of America’s greatest foes in the region. Iran competes viciously with Saudi Arabia for the predominant role in the region. Despite its brutally conducted bombing raids in Yemen, Riyadh remains one of Washington’s closest allies in the Middle East.

2. “Leading from behind” in the Middle East: Libya and Syria

The president clearly wanted to avoid being drawn into more new wars in the Middle East in particular but also elsewhere, unless going to war was regarded as absolutely crucial for maintaining U.S. national interests, narrowly defined. This resulted in Obama merely “leading from behind,” as one of his advisers expressed it, in the French and British-led effort to get rid of Libyan dictator Gaddafi. This “hands-off” approach led to the absence of any attempt to embark on some serious nation-building efforts once Gaddafi had been toppled in October 2011. Instead the North African country descended into chaos with the West largely watching passively from the sidelines.

The outcome of the western intervention in Libya convinced Obama to take a rather passive role in the brutal and barbaric war in Syria, despite his assurance in August 2012 (Obama’s infamous “red line”) that he would take action if Syrian President Assad used chemical weapons on his own people. Assad’s use of chemical weapons a year later did not lead to U.S. military engagement in Syria but rather to the negotiation between Washington and Moscow of a deal to move all of Assad’s chemical weapons out of the country. While this agreement was largely successfully implemented, the decision not to get militarily involved in Syria remains highly controversial. Although Obama continues to express his firm belief that this was the right policy, many analysts argue that it tarnished American credibility with Russia (and also China) and subsequently emboldened Moscow to get involved in the war in Syria. The president kept expressing his great concern about the Syrian situation, not least the human catastrophe in the region but he refused to get involved in any major way, rejecting, for instance, the establishment of American enforced no-fly zones and safe havens in parts of the country adjacent to Turkey.

3. Fighting international terrorism by other than conventional military means

Another major objective of the Obama administration was the attempt to re-focus on the war against fundamentalist terrorism by different means: terrorism, not least ISIS, was meant to be defeated by enhanced intelligence gathering, intensive drone warfare and the insertion of American advisers to provide some professional military advice to local rebel forces. Obama was adamant that no U.S. forces – no “boots on the ground” – would be committed in Syria or elsewhere. U.S. arms deliveries to rebel forces doing the West’s bidding occurred only reluctantly and within limits. While protesting loudly about Russia’s forceful involvement on the side of the government forces of Syrian president Assad, Obama was careful to exclude the possibility of any direct clash between U.S. and Russian forces.

A corollary of this policy of fighting terrorism from afar was Obama’s attempt to largely extricate the United States from the complex and in his view insoluble problems of the Middle East. The expansion of the hydraulic fracking industry in the United States helped to turn America into a net oil producer. It made the United States much less dependent on Middle Eastern oil than it had been for many decades. In 2015 only 24 percent of the oil consumed in the United States came from overseas, the lowest level since 1970.

4. Refocusing U.S. foreign policy on China: the “Pivot” to Asia

Both Obama and his first Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, were convinced that not the Middle East, including Iraq and Syria, but, above all, Asia and the Pacific region were of the highest relevance for the future of U.S. power, influence and security. Thus with the so-called “Asian pivot,” announced in November 2011, a “rebalancing” of Washington’s foreign policy occurred that takes due account of America’s geopolitical, economic and security interests in the region. By 2020, 60 percent of the U.S. navy may be based in the Pacific. The rise of China motivated this foreign policy shift. It was meant to allow Washington to manage Beijing’s increasingly influential global role. Not least China’s assertive claims on the sea, rocks and islands within the so-called “nine-dash-line,” and thus over 90 percent of the South China Sea, worries the United States and many Southeast Asian nations, some of whom have competing sovereignty claims in the South China Sea. Part of the “pivot to Asia” therefore was Obama’s intensive wooing of a significant number of China’s fourteen neighbors in Asia and his attempt to channel their fears about Beijing’s potential hegemonic role in the region in a pro-American direction. The successfully negotiated 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) had a similar function. While many Asian countries signed up to the trade deal finalized in October 2015, the United States made sure that China was not among them.

5. Cementing relations with Europe

U.S. foreign policy under Obama also sought to continue the close partnerships with the EU and NATO. At the same time the administration urged the Europeans, not least Germany, to become more involved in global affairs, and increase their defense efforts (greater “burden sharing” with the United States). The development of a European army with its own distinct headquarters is viewed skeptically in Washington, but this issue is unlikely to undermine the Alliance. The European allies, after all, were able to overcome surprisingly quickly much more serious transatlantic crises such as the repercussions of the global financial crisis of 2008-11 which hit Europe badly as well as the NSA espionage scandal.

Still, transatlantic relations at the end of Obama’s presidency look less good than at the beginning. It is unlikely that the negotiations for a new wide-ranging transatlantic trade deal – the TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – will succeed any time soon. This is a personal blow for Obama who has pushed hard for the negotiations to succeed. Similarly, the decision by the British in a referendum in mid-July 2016 to leave the EU (Brexit) was a personal defeat for Obama who had told the British during an official visit a few weeks before the referendum that the United States wanted the UK to remain a member of the EU. Europe has felt abandoned by the United States in its search for a solution to the refugee and migration crisis which has confronted the EU since 2015. No significant help has been offered by the Obama administration, though many in the EU blame Washington’s passive stance in the Syrian war and its earlier adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq for having contributed to if not caused the refugee crisis in the first place.

6. Overcoming some long-standing foreign policy problems: Iran, Myanmar and Cuba

Obama made a number of serious attempts to resolve some intractable long-standing foreign policy problems that had preoccupied his country for many years. Here the president invested much time and energy and a lot of political capital. He achieved some major successes. The Nuclear Deal with Iran was perhaps Obama’s greatest foreign policy triumph. In July 2015 his Secretary of State John Kerry and five other countries (China, Russia, France, UK, Germany) signed a landmark nuclear deal with Iran (the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA). Iran agreed not to build or prepare to build a nuclear weapon and to redesign its existing nuclear reactors, reduce its uranium stockpile and commit itself to “extraordinary and robust monitoring, verification, and inspection” of its nuclear energy sector for the next ten years. It was the Obama administration that was the driving force behind the deal while China and Russia also played a crucial part. Although the agreement proved to be highly controversial in U.S. domestic politics, abroad the deal was much applauded, despite the uncertainty as to whether or not Iran would strictly observe the conditions of the agreement. In return western sanctions on Iran including the freezing of financial assets, which had crippled Tehran’s economy, were largely lifted.

The administration's rapprochement and normalization of relations with the military regime in Myanmar and with Cuba also deserve praise. In Myanmar, U.S. influence and economic carrots led to free elections and the restoration of a largely democratic government. The beginning of a process of normalization between the United States and Cuba was announced in December 2014, after more than fifty years of tension and hostility. Diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba were restored in July 2015 and the president visited the island in 2016, the first sitting president to do so for eighty years. (His journey to Cuba was followed by a perhaps even more popular visit by the Rolling Stones.) The Obama administration also relaxed some aspects of America’s economic, financial and commercial embargo on Cuba and eased travel restrictions but the full removal of the embargo requires an act of Congress.

Obama’s foreign policy and its deficiencies: international terrorism, China and Russia     

Obama can thus point to some impressive foreign policy achievements. He was able to resolve some very complex problems that had defeated all of his predecessors. Yet his foreign policy is a mixed bag. On some issues of global importance the administration largely failed. Despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s best efforts, the administration, for instance, was not able to make progress in the Israel/Palestine conflict. In fact U.S.-Israeli relations plummeted to new depths with the personal animosity between Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the president becoming quite obvious.

During the Arab Spring in 2011, the United States failed to support the movements in the Arab street, despite its cautiously expressed sympathies. In Egypt for instance the White House contributed to forcing President Mubarak from power in February 2011 but eventually the normalization of relations with new hardline President el-Sisi has taken place. U.S. military aid to Egypt has been restored to its customary level. In fact, Washington is glad that Egypt has not descended into chaos like many other countries in the region but has remained a fairly stable pro-western nation, while having clearly developed into a police state. The same applied in Thailand where the military coup of May 2014 initially was much criticized by the administration. Still the relative stability of Thailand under the military government is appreciated in the United States and relations have been largely normalized again.

One of the greatest failures of the Obama administration is its inability to defeat ISIS, though some military progress has been made recently. Much more important, however, is the administration’s failure to successfully counter the fundamentalist philosophy and worldview held by many in the Middle East and in the West upon which the support of the terrorist movement rests. Relations with China, the superpower in waiting, are uneasy and difficult but there is some hope that both powers will continue to make genuine efforts not to embark on a serious economic, cybersecurity and military conflict. And cooperation with China has proved to be quite possible. After all, agreements such as the Iranian nuclear deal and the Paris climate conference treaty of December 2014 occurred with constructive Chinese cooperation. Beijing and Washington also agree in principle that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions need to be contained.

Perhaps the most disastrous and consequential failure has been the Obama administration’s inability to deal with Russia. After the March 2014 annexation of Crimea and the de facto-detachment of Eastern Ukraine, relations between the United States, EU and Russia went from bad to worse. Sanctions were imposed and Russia was excluded from the G-8. Anxiety about President Putin’s interest in further expansion, perhaps into the Baltic states and elsewhere in the former Soviet empire, made the West move NATO forces and missile shields eastward and invest in the strengthening and modernization of the NATO alliance. This in turn is seen by Russia as a serious threat.

Russia’s involvement in the war in Syria since September 30, 2015, on the side of the brutal Assad regime and Moscow’s increasingly unrelenting and cruel bombardments of cities such as Aleppo and other targets, both military and indeed civilian, have worsened relations further. While there has been constructive cooperation on other issues such as the Iran nuclear deal and the Geneva peace talks on Syria have led to limited cooperation between Moscow and Washington, on the whole Russian-western relations are in deep crisis. They are as bad as at the highpoint of the Cold War.

Conclusion                          

Towards the end of the Obama administration the global economic situation looks clearly better than in 2009 when the world was teetering on the brink of another Great Depression. Yet, global stability, not least in the Middle East, and U.S. relations with the other great powers in the world, notably, China, Russia and Europe, look more precarious than they did eight years ago. While this obviously is not President Obama’s fault alone, he clearly did not succeed in making the world more stable and less dangerous during his eight years in power. But perhaps without Obama and his sober presidency things would be even worse.

Klaus Larres is the Richard M Krasno Distinguished Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He also is a Senior Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, Washington DC and at present Fellow and Member at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey.

Image: President Barack Obama with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Department of Defense