Foreign Policy Achievements of Barack Obama
In 2008, former United States President Barrack Obama campaigned for president and reflected a fundamental change in the foreign policies of the United States of America. His promises were basically challenging, and changing old-fashioned dogmas that molded previous presidencies, from trying to rule the world, to ill-perceived efforts towards building the country in situations that many American citizens have always disregarded.
Objectives
To enable more efficient US involvement in situations that he believed were important, he saw the restoration of strategic solvency as a means of achieving that. His major objective was to drive the attention of the United States from military engagements in the Middle East that had characterized the US foreign policy for decades to the vibrant economic aspects of the Far East which he believed was having a significant influence on the health of the United States economy in terms of investment and trade. That shift also meant that prioritizing the economy of Europe and changes in security in the post-cold war error was no longer a big issue.
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Obama also promised to redefine idealism in form of changing from what he believed were “un-American practices” including torture to renewing policies that were in line with the values of America and the constitution of the United States. However, His constitutional variant comprised of omissions of high consequences. The powers of the United States presidency were not to be reduced although he emphasized the re-establishment of the rule of law including constitutionalism.
Obama wanted presidential powers for use as a medium of the modern presidency, but not to reduce these powers. In his mind, he thought of the possibility of changing the foreign policy of America without altering its structures of operation. The developments of 2016 were a clear indicator that the unexpected consequences of his agreeable but defective imagination have without doubt prevented him from achieving his foreign policies and reduced his legacy in general.
The promise
Many of the promises made by candidate Obama during his campaign were not particular actions. This was especially during the issues of peace and war. The schedule for withdrawing the US military from Iraq had been already set by the “Status of Force Agreement” and this had already been signed by President George. W bush prior to Obama’s entrance to the White House in January 2009. This agreement clearly stated a complete withdrawal of US military forces from Iraq by December 2011(New York Times 2012).
A big change made by Obama was when he tripled the levels of the United States military forces in Afghanistan. This is not surprising though. During his complaint, he often regarded the Middle East Conflict particularly the Iraq war as a strategy for America’s worldwide campaign against global terrorism assured adequate support towards the fight in Afghanistan in terms of allocating more resources than had been witnessed in his predecessor’s administrations. The reduction of troops in Iraq and US military buildup in Afghanistan had to raise US force levels in these two legacy wars closer to levels that were unsustainable and longer than expected by many Americans including Obama himself.
Obama’s change promises were more of new ways of thinking about foreign policy. According to CNN 31, January (2008), He was quoted saying “I don’t want to just end the war but I won't end the mindset that got us into war in the first place”, this was during his debate at a Democratic primary in 2008. With his presidency reaching 15 months, Obama once again announced “America’s commitment to seek peace without nuclear weapons”. He pledged a more even strategy to the security of America which believed was much better than the overly ambitious strategic objectives of Washington which were finite to the military and financial ability. In simple terms, his promise was to take a more rational step towards identifying the key interests of America’s security in regard to where it can intervene and where it cannot.
Obama’s promise was in other words, a more realistic understanding of America’s role in the global security arena which it had allocated itself at the time of the Cold War. Considering seventeen years after the breakup of the Soviet Union and a time when it is evident that there exists an overextension of America in terms of finance and military, the time for reassessment had come. Keeping up with the reassessment promise, Obama also pledged to drive resources away from what he regarded as stalemated competition for peripheral American mid-eastern interests.
Important Achievements
These episodes of weak leadership, disappointments, and defeats are just part of the story. The legacy of its foreign policies of Obama also includes some positive ones. His greatest foreign policy achievement is not grounded in the conventional foreign policy sphere in all terms. The looming financial disaster which was to have serious consequences on the authority and power of America in the global arena, world trade, and chain supply and result in mass unemployment more than America could persevere was what Obama helped to drive away in his early months in Office.
Some steps had already been taken by his predecessor in rescuing major banks whose failures would be disastrous and bailing out the auto industry but unemployment was rising rapidly and credit markets were still excessively frozen by the time Obama started his term as US President. It is Obama’s aggressive stimulus spending and steady-handed leadership that brought back confidence and halted the rapid economic decline. Not so many people believe that Obama’s Republican rival John McCain could have repaired such a difficult economic situation within months. It is easy to see that more direct federal and aggressive fiscal stimulus to provide relief to holders of mortgages and consumers would really be fruitful although it was easy to notice at that time. It is not easy to believe that the Democratic majority congress of 2009 would support such wide-reaching and powerful moves. America’s foreign policies were more solvent although as a result of the financial liberation moves that Obama made, these were more significant than it would else be.
Obama worked with allies from Europe and Russia in areas that are traditionally more related to foreign policy, to form a diplomatic move that was backed by multilateral sanctions. These moves proved very successful in blocking and persuading Iran to freeze its process of enriching bomb-grade Uranium. That move needed a decision to abandon the representative but unsuccessful one-sided maximalist approaches of his predecessors regarding the issue of Iran’s nuclear program.
Conclusion
According to the policies discussed above, the achievements of Obama, his gaps, and ambiguous results are connected with incremental modulation of the foreign policies of the United States. That is what shapes the legacies of American presidents but I don’t critically mean that.
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