Will Obama be remembered as one of the great US presidents?

Will Obama be remembered as one of the great US presidents?

Legacy is sought by presidents but hard to evaluate for years to come. Not least because much depends on how the country and next president handle their inheritance.

Mr Obama will hope future historians will include the following among his achievements when they come to judge him:

Saving the US economy after the 2008 banking crisis, Obamacare, the Iran deal and undeniable progress in dealing with humanity's greatest threat, climate change. The first cannot be undone by Donald Trump. The others can.

And his personal achievements will also be beyond the reach of his successor too. He will always be America's first black president, twice elected.

And he undeniably brought a decency, dignity and level of respect for the office he held, and a complete absence of scandal.


But beyond the Herculean effort of wrestling Obamacare through office Barack Obama has no great domestic legislative programme with his name on it.

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Most of the blame lies with his Republican nemeses on Capitol Hill who vowed to make him a one-term president. They opposed his stimulus bill which passed without a single one of their votes. And they threatened even to bring America to the point of default in a cynical effort to undermine his programme.

But he could have done more to cajole, charm or arm twist his opponents to cooperate and seemed to see all that as beneath him.

His election raised hopes America had turned a corner on race relations. He cautioned against over optimism on that front. Presciently as it turned out.

During his term in office relations have improved in some ways. There is a greater tolerance of difference in many respects, especially among the young, of sexuality and race.

But in US law enforcement's relations with African American communities there has been little progress in many quarters. As we have seen in a series of police shootings of black men and the unrest they have provoked. His critics say he did not use the powers of his office enough to tackle the problem.

Likewise with the ongoing epidemic of mass shootings. Despite the massacre of young children at Sandy Hook he was not able to bring about greater gun control. But most of the blame for that lies with his Republican opponents and the cynical manipulation of the legislative process by the gun lobby.

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Mr Obama's greatest failures arguably lie overseas. He hoped for a "pivot to Asia" but was repeatedly yanked back to focus on the Middle East.

His greatest mistake was perhaps in a speech in Cairo in 2009 when he demanded Israel freeze building illegal settlements on occupied land.

In the struggle of wills that followed Israel prevailed, Palestinians were humiliated and the region took note. This was a president who could be forced to back down.

So Syria's president Bashar al Assad seemed unconcerned by Mr Obama's "red line" on using chemical weapons. The US president never followed through on the threat to use force.

Conveniently a Russian brokered disarmament deal gave him a face-saving way out. But the episode led some Syrian rebels to abandon more moderate groups and join extremists in despair.

Historians will argue over Syria for decades to come. Mr Obama was wary of being drawn into a Middle Eastern quagmire as his predecessor had but his inaction over the conflict undoubtedly created a vacuum that spurred rebels to pursue more extremist aims.

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On his watch Islamic State went from a "junior varsity" outfit in the words of the president, to a well resourced organisation with a power to kill and terrorise well beyond the borders of its mini-Caliphate.

And on his watch Russia has emerged as a rising power in the Middle East for the first time since the early years of the Cold War. And Moscow has invaded and occupied a neighbour and successfully destabilised the surrounding territory in Ukraine.

In the words of one Washington Post editorial at the height of the Syria crisis, the president pursued the foreign policy of a fantasist. He saw the world how he wanted to see it, not how it is. That undoubtedly led to misplaced complacency at times and clouded his judgement at others.

Compared to the utter debacle of the Bush administration's occupation and misrule of Iraq and all that followed, Mr Obama's mistakes pale in comparison. If the Trump presidency blunders into other foreign misadventures Mr Obama may well be forgiven for his. In this way, his record will be affected by his successor's.