Unpredictable international events often wreak havoc with presidents’ lofty foreign policy goals, but no one could have predicted just how far President Obama would be thrown off course in 2014.
At the beginning of the year, the president was on pace to end two of America’s longest wars with broad public backing.
Twelve months later, Obama’s well of support for a return to domestic issues has vanished, replaced by widespread public mistrust for his handling of foreign affairs.
One international crisis after another over the past year forced the United States back into Iraq and into the middle of several other conflicts that critics say he could have avoided with more foresight and attention.
The crises drove down Obama’s foreign policy poll numbers and had the rare political impact of contributing to Democrats’ losing control of the Senate and suffering deep losses in the House in November, polls show.
Against that backdrop, Obama less than two weeks ago made his surprise power play to change 50 years of history in an attempt to normalize relations with Cuba.
“One gets the sense [with the Cuba move] that Obama’s trying to produce a success in at least one major area,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “But what we’ve seen all year is a series of unforced errors across the board.”
The year witnessed the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and its threat to topple the government of Iraq, the rebirth of an emboldened and belligerent Russia, chaos in Syria’s civil war, a deadly outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa, and no breakthrough with Iran in talks over its nuclear program.
State Department spokesman Marie Harf acknowledged 2014 was a rough year but said the United States has emerged more engaged and showing more leadership to the world.
“If you’ve seen some of the challenges we’ve had over the last year,” she told reporters Tuesday at the last press conference of the year, “It’s been tough, it’s been difficult, but across the board I think you see more American leadership in more places and more issues and more areas than we’ve ever been before, period, even though a lot of challenges remain.
“My point is American leadership and success and strength in foreign policy is not about predicting when things are going to happen or preventing bad things from happening in the world,” she continued. “It’s how you respond to a variety of crises around the world and how you take action to prevent future crises.”
A reporter quickly countered with a sharp critique: “Literally, it sounds like what you’re describing is a policy of response rather than prevention.”
Obama’s critics share that view and argue that the president stuck too closely to his script and his attempt to pivot the nation’s attention away from the Middle East, failing to prevent some of the crises as they were forming, especially when the Syrian civil war took a sharp turn for the worse.
Even early this year, some critics argue, the administration wasted an opportunity to hit the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as the terrorist army was building momentum in Syria, as well as the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, while bolstering the moderate Syrian rebels.
Later in the year, the Sunni-based rebels became more tolerant of their spiritual brethren in the Islamic State, who share their desire to oust Assad from power. A strengthened ISIS then led an unchecked march across Iraq, massacring religious minorities and seizing control of large swaths of the country.
Instead of finding a way to stop ISIS, Obama spent most of his international capital trying to develop an historic agreement with Iran to roll back its nuclear program but ended the year with only an extension of an interim deal made in November 2013. The administration extended talks months into June, making a growing bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress nervous that Washington is conceding too much to Tehran while its weapons development has continued unabated.
Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said Obama’s focus in 2013 and the first part of 2014 on minimizing U.S. engagement in the world was a mistake and, in many ways, led to the state of unrest in Syria and Iraq.
But the June 12 fall of Mosul, a major city in Iraq, to the Islamic State was a major wake-up call. And since then, he says Obama has made some major improvements in re-engaging the U.S. military in airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria and building an international coalition to fight the extreme terrorist group.
“[He’s] showing a greater willingness to act,” O’Hanlon said. “The world has demanded that he be more engaged than he wanted to be.”
After Obama was forced to do an about-face in Iraq and send U.S. servicemen back in as advisers, there were outward signs of a new approach.
In confronting the threat from the Islamic State in the fall, Obama began to embrace the idea of American exceptionalism more vocally, sprinkling his speeches with talk of leadership role the United States plays in the world when no one else will.
When it comes to Russia aggression in Ukraine, O’Hanlon said Obama bears far less responsibility, especially for Moscow’s rapid annexation of the Crimea in early spring.
For months afterward, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent Russian soldiers and supplies across the border into Eastern Ukraine to fuel instability and promote pro-Russian separatists.
“I don’t believe Russia behaved this year fundamentally based on Obama’s actions,” he said. “In Russia, there’s a sense of disenfranchisement and bitterness, and those predated Obama.”
The economic ties between Russia and the European Union, especially Germany, also tied Obama’s hands when it came to punishing Putin. Washington strengthened sanctions against Moscow, but limited international trade penalties came only after months of NATO hand-wringing.
Now the Russian economy is suffering, but not from sanctions. The 50 percent plunge in international oil prices is eating away at Russia’s energy-dependent economy, and the Russian central bank recently raised interest rates 6.5 percentage points to 17 percent in an effort to stabilize the ruble.
As Obama looks ahead to 2015 and the final two years of his presidency, low oil prices may help him gain leverage in negotiations with Iran and Russia. He also has a chance to change course in other areas, especially in Afghanistan where many foreign policy experts are pushing him to keep a contingent of U.S. troops and abandon pledges to send the vast majority of them home by the end of 2016.
“We should not want NATO to replace us — the long-term mission is about striking extremists with drones and targeting al Qaeda and preventing the Afghan government from falling to the Taliban,” O’Hanlon said. “We purchased the right to be there in blood.”
Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the next two years will give Obama a narrow window to correct his foreign policy mistakes, but he has his work cut out for him.
In an article written in early December, Cordesman says he hasn’t seen a broad new Obama foreign policy vision take shape since the president’s “we don’t have a strategy yet” statement about ISIS in late August.
That gaffe, Cordesman wrote, “seems to apply to more than the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.”
“It seems to apply to having a viable strategy for any of the wars the administration will have to fight through to the end,” he wrote.
But Cordesman held out hope for a foreign policy reset in the new year, one in which the president and his team will have to do much more than react.
“While events sometimes force changes in strategy, a good strategy forces change in events,” Cordesman wrote.
