There is a debate in Washington over whether America should exert a lighter or heavier influence in world affairs. President Obama has tried a middle path: He wants to exert heavy influence over world events with the light touch of America’s benevolent hand.
It isn’t working. This becomes ever clearer as he learns repeatedly, the hard way, that his superstar status and intellect give him no more pull over the actions of foreign leaders or the attitudes of foreign peoples than his predecessor. And, oddly, this reality seems to surprise him every time.
Obama entered office aspiring to “reset” relations with Russia and offer a hand of friendship to Islamic peoples. Before his election in 2008, he expressed hope that even his name and his father’s Muslim origins could help him relate to the Arab and Muslim world. Before his re-election in 2012, he scoffed at the notion that Russia was a “geopolitical foe,” and was caught on tape signaling American “flexibility” to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Obama now seems frustrated that his hand of friendship has been bitten off; that his “flexibility” has been used to press his face to the ground.
The relatively stable Iraq that Obama exited in haste during his re-election cycle is now being overrun by a well-funded and possibly self-sustaining terrorist army – arguably more powerful than anything America faced in al Qaeda. ISIS has amassed an increasingly advanced arsenal and is attracting thousands of new recruits through its successes, its pretensions to statehood, and even its widely broadcast atrocities. Osama bin Laden is dead, and ISIS is fulfilling his vision.
Where Arab views of the United States have changed since the late Bush era, they have deteriorated, as Pew has found. Even friendly governments in the region are deciding America is now irrelevant to their concerns. In the failed state of Libya that Obama helped create, U.S. allies now conduct airstrikes disregarding American input. The governments of Egypt and Israel, longtime enemies but both American allies, have in some ways become closer partners to one another than either one is to the United States. These are signs of waning U.S. influence.
In Europe, Putin is incrementally waging an aggressive war that has gotten far beyond the point where Obama has a good response. Secretary of State John Kerry ridiculed Putin for behaving “in a nineteenth century fashion,” as though he were some kind of Tea Party politician who could be shamed out of his ambitions. But however antiquated Putin’s approach to international relations may be, it doesn’t alter the reality that his worldview is prompting him to take actions that present a threat to U.S. interests.
In less than six years, Obama has turned America into an angry spectator on the world’s sidelines, which reacts to one crisis after another without an effective plan to ease tensions or restore stability. As many people remarked in 2008, the White House is not a good place to learn on the job.
