The Impacts of Obama's Foreign Policy on World Order

Shortly after the Midterm election, an event called the Munk Debates was held on November 5 to discuss the theme, “Has Obama’s foreign policy emboldened US enemy and made the world more dangerous?”. The Munk Debates are semiannual panel discussions on public policy issues, which are held in Tronto under auspices of a Canadian philanthropist Peter Munk who owns a mining company Barrick Gold. This event draws extensive attention in the English-speaking world, and broadcasted by Caple Public Affairs Channel (CPAC) and CBC of Canada, C-SPAN of the United States, and BBC of the United Kingdom. See the video below.
This event invited four panelists to discuss negative impacts of Obama’s foreign policy on world peace. Pro discussants to this theme were Rober Kagan, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Bret Stevens, Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Con discussants were Anne Marie Slaughter, President and CEO of the New America Foundation, and Fareed Zakaria, Host of International Affairs Program of CNN. In this past 6 years, America’s enemies are more multiplied, and behaving more provocatively than ever. Russia’s aggressive policy to Ukraine horrified Europe, as Putin’s behavior to change national borders by force is unprecedented since the end of World War II. The number of Jihadists is rising sharply, and they even found a state-like realm ruled by Sharia law.
Despite the growing global insecurity, perception gaps between Americans and non-Americans are considerable. While Americans disapprove of Obama’s foreign policy far more than they do of domestic policy, it seems that people outside the Unites States still see Obama positively, as if he were the savior to overturn Bush’s unilateralism and overcome domestic racism as surveys in Germany, Indonesia, and China show. However, Barak Obama’s performance on the global stage is extremely poor. As Bret Stevens said at the event, Obama has not achieved his election promise in foreign policy from curbing terrorism in the Middle East and withdrawing US Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, resetting relations with Russia, to improving ties with Europe and the Islamic world. To the contrary, America’s enemies are growing more active. Jihadists are rampant even though Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden. Russia has reset the reset, and become more adversarial.
Slaughter and Zakaria defend Obama that it is the change of global politics like the rise of non-state actors and emerging nations that matters, which makes the world more complicated. Certainly, Obama is not necessarily responsible for every challenge that America faces today. However, we must doubt his credential as a leader of the state, in view of his precarious and fatal remark to call ISIS a JV team (“What Obama said about Islamic State as a 'JV' team”; PolitiFact.com; September 7, 2014). That startled his own senior officials like Leon Panetta and Michèle Flournoy, and military staff (“Obama ignores Panetta’s warning”; Washington Post; October 6, 2014). History tells us that great empires were often defeated by minor tribes. It is dangerous to belittle the enemy, however weak they are.
In a global security environment as mentioned above, the focal point was the impact of Obama’s failure to meet the red line to stop chemical weapon abuse in Syria, because it was regarded as America’s weakness to manage crisis around the world. Russia’s aggression to Ukraine is a typical case. Furthermore, Kagan stressed that allies from Japan to Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are increasingly concerned with Obama’s appeasement to their enemies in their neighborhood such as China, North Korea, Iran, and ISIS. Rising doubts to American leadership leads to further damages to world peace. Democracy is declining, and rule based world order is defied by autocrats. These points are the core of Kagan’s argument in this event and his publications. Apparently, Obama’s lack of confidence in American leadership makes the world more and more dangerous. For a rebuttal, Slaughter repeatedly asked pro-panelists to prove that global security environment would be much better off, without Obama. But her comment is meaningless, because there is no way of seeing a virtual world. However, his fatal error of ignoring national security experts allowed jihadist vandalism in Iraq and Syria. There is no way of denying its ripple effect globally.
TO BE CONTINUED LATER.