Farewell addresses are a legacy-defining opportunity for presidents to set out their accomplishments and articulate a vision for the future. And US President Barack Obama’s speech was no exception, with him lauding key achievements including US international climate change leadership; the Iranian nuclear deal; restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba; the hunting down of Osama Bin Laden; and the progressive degradation of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) in Iraq and Syria.
In the current fluid, complex and high-risk international political and economic landscape, Obama has certainly achieved some significant accomplishments. One big positive, for instance, has been the US role in helping deliver the breakthrough climate change deal agreed in Paris in 2015 signed by more than 170 countries.
While the agreement is not perfect, and has been attacked by Trump, it represents a welcome shot in the arm for attempts to tackle global warming and, crucially, a new post-Kyoto framework has been put in place. And the deal has been ratified in record speed for such a big international accord — coming into effect last November.
In a clear warning to Trump, who has threatened to walk away from the Paris deal, Obama asserted that “without bolder action, our children won’t have the time to debate the existence of climate change; they’ll be busier dealing with its effects: Environmental disasters, economic disruptions and waves of climate refugees seeking sanctuary”.
Another Obama success is the 2014 nuclear deal between Iran and six other powers — the US, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. In his words, “this has shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons programme without a firing a shot”.
The Iran agreement, which US President-elect Donald Trump has also slammed, could enhance global nuclear security and also constitute an important win for long-standing efforts to combat nuclear non-proliferation. Despite Trump’s previous rhetoric, senior Republicans on Capitol Hill, including the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, recognise the benefits the deal brings and have called for it be more strictly enforced, rather than scrapped.
Obama also highlighted landmarks in the campaign against terrorism such as the taking “out of tens of thousands of terrorists, including Osama Bin Laden”. Despite significant setbacks in Iraq and Syria over the last eight years, the US president also laid out that “the global coalition we’re leading against [Daesh] has ... taken away half their territory... [and it] will be destroyed”.
In a warning to Trump, who has appeared to advocate measures such as “carpet bombing” in the campaign against terrorism, Obama warned that Daesh “cannot defeat America unless we betray our Constitution and our principles on the fight”. The point of emphasis here is that the battle against terrorism is as much one of ideas (soft power) as military might.
Turning to the Americas, Obama pointed to the “opening of a new chapter with the Cuban people”, a geopolitical play which Trump has yet again threatened to reverse. In December 2014, the two countries announced they would restore diplomatic relations and Obama became the first US president to visit the country in almost 90 years last March, announcing a new suite of measures that further eroded the bilateral sanctions regime introduced during the Cold War era.
The setbacks
Despite these achievements, however, and the fact that Obama leaves office on a seven-year high approval rating of 56 per cent, according to Gallup, his final speech comes at a time when there has been rising criticism of his administration after setbacks, including Russia’s successful intervention in Syria to shore up the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad; and the unravelling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has caused angst with US allies. To detractors, Washington has become significantly diminished on the world stage with weak presidential leadership accounting for this.
However, this is too simplified. For instance, while Obama has not advanced as fully as he hoped his ‘pivot’ to Asia-Pacific, it is actually Trump’s opposition to TPP that looks to have signed the death-warrant to the trade deal, not the Obama team that has cultivated it for years.
Meanwhile, while Obama has made multiple mistakes in the Middle East, his strategic decision to downscale US presence in the region was taken in the context of the mandate he perceived himself to have won in his big election victory in 2008, when a war-weary nation seemed to back his call that the Iraq conflict had been a costly mistake and that the country was militarily overstretched overseas during the George W. Bush presidency. More generally, critiques of Obama’s foreign policy often neglect that, while the US remains the most powerful country in the world — certainly in a military sense — it is not an all-powerful hegemonic power. And this core fact has been demonstrated repeatedly before and after his presidency — from Somalia in 1993, Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 and also most recently in Ukraine and Libya.
Given the current international political fault lines, there are no easy, quick-fix ways for the US to enforce its policy preferences including tensions with China over the latter’s territorial claims in the South China Sea; the nuclear stand-off in the Korean peninsula, which may yet intensify in the context of the political tensions in South Korea where the president has been impeached; continuing instability in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya; and the bleak prospects facing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Taken overall, Obama’s speech robustly defended his foreign policy record at a time of growing criticism. While he achieved significant accomplishments, he, however, knows that much of his legacy now risks being rolled back, at least partially, by the Trump team with its potentially very different agenda.
Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS (the Centre for International Affairs, Diplomacy and Strategy) at the London School of Economics.
