Obama's Legacy in International Relations

My thesis is that the foreign policies of the Obama Administration yielded an international relations environment that China and Russia perceived to be weak. The corollary to that thesis is that the perceived weakness was viewed as a power vacuum which Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were more than happy to fill.

At the not insubstantial risk of judging without sufficient evidence, it appears that President Obama's legacy was shaped by a reaction to the foreign policies of President Bush. However, Obama over-corrected, resulting in policies that were understood that the United States did not wish to confront the world. States like China and Russia saw opportunity to increase their influence.

The specific actions I present as evidence include: Chinese actions in the South China Sea; the buildup and modernization of the Chinese military forces; Russian annexation of Crimea; Russian military action in eastern Ukraine; Russian intervention in Syria; and the Russian sale of an advanced S-300 air defense system to Iran.

Neither China nor Russia would have made those moves without some sense that the United States either would not or could not respond in such a fashion as to stop them. We see a realist zero-sum power game being played.

In President Obama's favor, he was exceptionally aggressive in his operations against terrorist organizations. But he was seen by some to be indecisive in his reactions to the Arab Spring, and his failure to follow through on his "red line" threat concerning Syrian chemical weapons has drawn derision from many sources.

So, where has the Obama foreign and security policy left the United States? I am pessimistic that the troubling trends will only increase and may well result in violence within the next year or two.