Obama's Enduring Legacy of Appeasment, Staggering Debt, and Enormous Racial Animosity

From Victor Davis Hanson, at National Review, "What Obama Has Taught Us":

President Obama last week spiked the ball on the Supreme Court’s decisions to legalize gay marriage and to ratify the Affordable Care Act.

Yet it is difficult to see quite how Obama had much to do with these decisions — or, to the degree he did, that they are earth-shattering. He twice ran for president expressing opposition to gay marriage while emphasizing the religious element of holy matrimony, which, he argued, precluded same-sex marriages. Is he delighted that the Court ignored his prior views?

On the Obamacare front, all the Supreme Court did was to clean up the Affordable Care Act, in a postmodern ruling that the administration’s poorly worded law actually meant something other than what the text as written actually said. The Court’s intervention was an act of partisan salvation, not disinterested legal reasoning.

Obama’s trade pact passed only with Republican votes. Apparently free-traders in Congress wanted the deal more than they worried about the president’s taking credit for their eleventh-hour rescue of what otherwise would have been a strong rebuke from his own party.

Nonetheless, Obama still talks of his “change” legacy, as if altering something necessarily meant improving it. Pulling all U.S. peacekeepers out of Iraq certainly changed the dynamics there, as ISIS can testify. The current talks with Iran will change Iranian ideas about how best to get the bomb. Normalizing relations with Stalinist Cuba also changes — as in increases — that regime’s viability.

Nonetheless, Obama still talks of his “change” legacy, as if altering something necessarily meant improving it. Pulling all U.S. peacekeepers out of Iraq certainly changed the dynamics there, as ISIS can testify. The current talks with Iran will change Iranian ideas about how best to get the bomb. Normalizing relations with Stalinist Cuba also changes — as in increases — that regime’s viability.

Jimmy Carter was asked to evaluate President Obama’s foreign-policy record. He concluded that it was hard to identify any improvement in our relations with any nation since Obama took office, defining change as change for the worse. Carter for once is probably right. Some of our outright enemies — Vladimir Putin, for example — have changed by showing even more contempt for us than they did in 2008, apparently on the Munich pattern that appeasement wins, not praise for magnanimity, but rather contempt for obsequiousness. Hitler, remember, vowed to stomp on his benefactor, Neville Chamberlain, after the latter gave him what he wanted in 1938. “Worms,” the Führer scoffed of his appeasers.

Iran so far has repaid Obama’s indulgence by blowing up a mock U.S. aircraft carrier in military drills, de facto running affairs in three other Middle Eastern states — Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen — and brazenly renouncing almost all the basic elements of prior nonproliferation understandings, from on-site inspections to cessation of enrichment to kickback sanctions in the event of noncompliance. Iran embraces change, and looks forward to a nuclear future.

Apparently, the theocracy sees Barack Obama and John Kerry as hell-bent changers, willing to achieve their own legacies at the expense of the interests of their country and its allies — and thus as bewildering and worthy of contempt in a world where leaders are expected to promote their own people’s interests. Expect the geriatric Castros to share the same contempt for American outreach, and to double down on their anti-Americanism and their ruthless suppression of freedom to add spite to the embarrassment of U.S. appeasement. They see U.S. recognition as a big change that will further empower their police state. What allies we have left in the Middle East seem either tired of the U.S. change or baffled by it.

What allies we have left in the Middle East seem either tired of the U.S. change or baffled by it — especially Israel, Jordan, the Gulf monarchies, and Egypt. All that can be said for a changing U.S. foreign policy is that our friends see the Iran deal as a framework for changing ideas about their own nuclear acquisition — on the logic that the institutionalization of American nonproliferation models makes it fairly easy for anyone to get a bomb. Not since Israel got the bomb has any other ally or friend of the United States gone nuclear. (China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea were hostile to the U.S. at the time of their nuclear acquisitions.) Obama may well change that trend too, as we see all sorts of former allies and friends. both in the Middle East and in the Pacific region. creeping toward becoming nuclear powers — fearing either that they are no longer protected by the U.S. or that, on Obama’s watch, too many crazy neighbors may go nuclear.

Our friends have come to resent American change, especially the Obama administration’s sense of self-righteousness that judges partners on impossible standards that it does not apply to enemies or neutrals, such as Iran, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority. Obama’s smugness turns old allies off — as by defining ISIS as a jayvee organization, or psychoanalyzing Putin as a class cut-up bent on a macho shtick when he gobbles up neighboring countries, or lecturing Israel on Obama’s rare insight on what is really in the Jewish state’s self-interest.

If one wants an exemplar of change-failure, then look to Iraq or Libya. The abrupt pullout of all U.S. peacekeepers changed postwar Iraq, just as, if we had left Kosovo in 2001 or South Korea in 1955, the result would have been utter chaos. The logical outcome of bombing Libya without worry about what would follow on the ground was ISIS’s beheadings and “what difference does it make?” lies about Benghazi. Libya and Iraq are the faces of change.

The Europeans are flummoxed...

Keep reading, if you want. VDH just speaks too much truth about this cluster of a faux-president.