A much greater criticism of Obama is not that of weakness, but on the contrary that three times he has taken actions that have violated his own foreign policy philosophy and unnecessarily increased international dangers.

“The Obama Doctrine” was the title of the series of interviews on foreign policy conducted with the President by Jeffrey Goldberg and published in the April 2016 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. As the Obama presidency draws to a close, it therefore makes sense to ask not just how successful his foreign and security policy has been, but whether it has in fact been based on a coherent set of ideas.Speaking from the Realist side of the policy debate, I would say that Obama does have a coherent set of ideas, and has been successful (or at least avoided causing unnecessary trouble) when he has stuck to them; but that the political culture of the US foreign policy establishment often makes it very difficult to maintain a Realist line; and that Obama himself has sometimes exercised insufficient control over his subordinates, partly thanks to the malign influence of Hillary Clinton. Moreover, on two critical issues at least Obama has strayed from the ethical and imaginative Realism of a Niebuhr or Kennan towards the hard, zero-sum version of Realism which combines so jarringly – not to use a stronger word - in Washington with the constant language of moralism and US moral superiority.As is apparent from these interviews and previous statements, Obama himself is a self-proclaimed Realist. He has described the American Christian Realist thinker Reinhold Niebuhr as his favourite philosopher, and expressed his deep admiration for General Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor under the very Realist administration of George Bush senior. Much of Obama’s own language on foreign policy also reflects Realist tropes. Thus Obama has repeatedly spoke of the need to weigh up likely consequences and the balance of forces before taking actions.His most famous foreign policy maxim, “Don’t do stupid s***”, is just a less elegant contemporary way of expressing the traditional Realist value of Prudence. The ethic of consequences is closely tied to Max Weber’s Ethic of Responsibility (Verantwortungsethik), which he and subsequent US Realist thinkers like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan made central to their own version of ethical realism, and which they opposed the Ethic of Conviction (Gesinnungsethik) which demands moral action irrespective of likely consequences, and which is epitomised by figures like Samantha Powers, the anti-“Genocide” activist and Obama’s ambassador to the UN.As the Atlantic Monthly interviews make clear, this approach goes against the instincts of large parts of the US foreign and security policy establishment, including members of his own administration. Among these are his former rival, Secretary of State and likely successor, Hillary Clinton. And while Realism has often been followed in practice by US administrations, the ideas behind it do go against the attitudes that have grown up in recent decades as a result of the combination of US ideological nationalism and the illusion – after the end of the Cold War – of absolute and uncheckable US global power. This mixture is all too evident in the language of Hillary Clinton, and in her election propaganda “memoir”, Hard Choices.If Obama has nonetheless been able mostly to stick to his Realist line – with some very important and terrible exceptions, to which I shall return – it is above all because in the wake of the Iraq disaster, the Afghan War and the hyperbolic, hypocritical and futile “Freedom Agenda” of the Bush administration, there is very little appetite indeed in the US public for more military adventures. Hence the last minute volte-face of the Republican Party in the Senate when Obama threw the issue of Syrian intervention to them to decide when the regime in Damascus (probably) used chemical weapons in 2013. After all their bluster about Obama’s “weakness” on Syria, they opposed intervention at the last minute – because they were looking at the opposition of majorities in public opinion polls, including among Republican voters.Of great importance in this regard has also been that the US uniformed military is also strongly against more military adventures, as expressed in the famous statement of Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense under both Bush and Obama, that “Any future US Secretary of Defense who advises a President to become involved in another ground war in Asia should have his head examined”.In August 2008 Gates was instrumental in blocking in Cabinet a suggestion from Vice President Dick Cheney that US forces should be sent to Georgia as a demonstration against Russia (though even Cheney did not say that they should actually attack Russia). As Obama complained with pardonable exasperation about the Republicans accusing him of weakness over Ukraine, George Bush had previously backed down over Georgia, after giving the Georgians much more encouragement than Obama gave the Ukrainians prior to 2014.This is the answer to the charge against Obama of “weakness” in foreign and security policy: that as Bush himself demonstrated during his second term, there is simply no longer the will in the USA, including the US military, for military adventures that are likely to prove costly in terms of blood and money. Moreover, it has now been demonstrated that even more important than blood and money is the issue of time. The US – and European – populations are not willing to make the commitments necessary to turn somewhere like Iraq or Afghanistan into modern states and stable US allies if this will require a presence lasting not years but decades.Finally, it has been proved that – despite all the past language that “the US is so powerful that if it has the will it can do anything (something that between 2000 and 2007 in Washington I heard from both Republican and Democratic foreign policy thinkers) in many parts of the world the USA fails because local states are willing to bring more power to bear, make greater sacrifices and run bigger risks than the USA; because the problems concerned are occurring on their borders and are seen as vital interests. Thus Russia is obviously not a power to match the USA on the world stage as a whole, but it has outmatched it in the Caucasus, eastern Ukraine and even Syria.Obama has therefore operated in a world of drastically reduced US potential compared to what was assumed – wrongly – by the Bush administration and its admirers. In Syria, as noted, Obama’s “weakness” was in fact endorsed by the great majority of the US public – including those Republican supporters who love to repeat the “weakness” line. And in certain respects, while Obama obviously has a strong preference for diplomacy, he has even gone further in the use of force than Bush. Thus he has vastly expanded the US drone programme, which is one of extra-judicial assassination of enemies by another name.What then have been the real successes and failures of the Obama administration? Obviously these include the complete failure to bring about Israeli-Palestinian peace – but the power of the Israel lobby and its adherents or slaves in the US political system make this impossible for any US president, at least in this age of the world. In defying Netanyahu over the Iran nuclear deal, Obama has gone further than any previous president in challenging Israel, and almost certainly much further than Hillary Clinton will be willing to do. The Iran deal is Obama’s greatest foreign policy success by far, followed a long way after by the opening to Cuba – something that admittedly should have happened a generation ago. Bush could have had a better Iran deal 14 years ago, but turned it down, and Clinton an even better one in 90s. Opposition to the Iran deal makes no sense unless the USA is willing to attack Iran. That now means taking side of Saudi Arabia and Sunni sectarian extremists in Middle East, pointing towards what could be a sort of de facto alliance with IS and Al Qaeda, which would be madness. This is now vastly beyond America’s strength – and is also crazy, since as even Trump has recognized, IS is by far the greatest threat to US and still more Europe. Like it or not, Iran and Hizbollah have played a critical role on the ground in containing IS. Even before nuclear deal, US was quietly co-operating with Iranian forces on the ground in Iraq to co-ordinate with US air campaign there. The same logic points towards acceptance of Russian role in Syria. It is the Russian air force that has turned back IS – because co-ordinated with a real fighting force on the ground, Syrian army backed by Hizbollah. It is this combination that has now retaken Palmyra and other places whose fall ti IS caused such anxiety in the West.Obama’s other successes have been mostly negative ones. He did not intervene in Syria in 2013 to destroy the Syrian regime and army – thank God, because if he had, the revolt of the Islamic State the following year would probably have left IS in Damascus by now. And he did not go nearly as far in putting pressure on Russia over Ukraine as US hawks – once again probably including Hillary – would have wished, thereby avoiding another foreign policy disaster and leaving the way open for co-operation over Syria and an eventual possible restoration of relations.Concerning the failures, one has been admitted by Obama himself, in the Atlantic Monthly interviews and elsewhere. This was the failure to make serious plans for how to stabilize a post-Ghadafi Libya, after the decision had been made to topple him. This admission is a great improvement on Hillary Clinton, who – incredibly – still seeks to portray the overthrow of Ghadafi as a US success (the Libyan affair by the way, on top of her vote for the Iraq invasion, should disqualify Hillary from any future role in US foreign policy). But Obama did not take the next step, of recognizing (after Iraq had proved this) that the very idea of regime change by force is a mistaken one, in circumstances where whatever it does, the US cannot in fact decisively influence subsequent developments. In other words, there often is no realistic plan for a stable postwar situation.The US military withdrawal from Iraq, and the planned one from Afghanistan, were both grossly premature, and appear to have been driven largely by Obama’s desire to leave a personal foreign policy “legacy” of ending US involvement in wars. The Iraq withdrawal was admittedly demanded by the Shia-dominated Maliki regime in Baghdad, but that pressure should have been resisted, because it opened the way for an unqualified Shia hegemony which paved the way for the IS revolt three years later. In Afghanistan, Obama was right to hesitate concerning the US military surge ordered in 2009, and wrong to accede to it. But he was also wrong to try to insist on the US thereafter withdrawing its forces completely by the end of last year – something that would almost certainly have led to a collapse of the US army and state. Here, the US military are often more correct in their thinking than many politicians: highly skeptical of launching wars, but determined to stay the course once the wars have begun.A much greater criticism of Obama is not that of weakness, but on the contrary that three times he has taken actions or acquiesced in the policies of subordinates (for which he cannot evade moral and political responsibility) that have violated his own foreign policy philosophy and unnecessarily increased international dangers. These are Libya – which has already been mentioned – Ukraine, and containment of China (otherwise known as the “Pivot to Asia”).