GETTY US President Barack Obama at the year-end press conference

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In their own ways each demonstrated just why the day cannot come too soon when this most overrated and inept president disappears from public office. In Hawaii the soon-to-be former president took part in a ceremony at Pearl Harbor alongside Japanese PM Shinzo Abe. According to President Obama, Mr Abe’s visit was a “historic gesture”. But there was not a word of apology from the Japanese leader for the outrage committed by his country in 1941.

Vladimir Putin in pictures Tue, December 13, 2016 Russin President Vladimir Putin in pictures Play slideshow 1 of 56

Now the US is widely regarded as spineless – a damning and, for anyone who cares about freedom and the values the US has always defended, deeply worrying indictment. That is one reason why President-elect Trump’s campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, resonated so well. He wasn’t just talking to the millions of Americans who felt let down by President Obama’s domestic failures. He was able to tap in to their worries that the US was no longer a serious player on the global stage. It’s certainly a worry that the President-elect appears to believe that Russia has every reason to be in the Crimea and that his idea of resetting relations with the Russians is giving them a free hand. But in other areas he does seem to grasp what needs to come. He has said he will unravel the Iran deal and he is clear that Israel must be treated like an ally, not an enemy. Above all, if he is serious about making America great again, it will mark a much needed departure from the past eight years.

It was pure gesture politics – an empty shell of warm words and nothingness and as such entirely appropriate to the past eight years of the Obama presidency, which has placed meaningless gestures above serious action.

He is an overrated and inept leader

Meanwhile in Washington DC, John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, was again demonstrating the unique blend of incompetence, arrogance and pomposity that has repeatedly confirmed him as the most disastrously useless holder of that great office of state in recent memory. For his final act as Secretary of State he chose to invite the world’s media to the State Department while he spent over an hour attacking Israel, the US’s staunchest ally in the Middle East. In a region of despots and butchers, Israel is a democracy that observes the rule of law and all Western norms of human rights. WILL WORLD WAR 3 BREAK OUT BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE US?

REUTERS Japanese PM Shinzo Abe and US President Barack Obama

Three hundred miles from the Israeli border lie the victims of Syrian leader Bashar Al Assad’s massacres. But while Mr Kerry and President Obama have responded to the murder and displacement of millions in Syria by standing by, their reaction to Israel building some houses in disputed land in East Jerusalem has been to launch the most ferocious verbal attack of the entire Obama presidency. But betraying allies and standing by and watching while the enemies of freedom do their worst has been the hallmark of President Obama’s administration. Infamously in 2012 President Obama declared that should the Syrian leader use chemical weapons it would cross a “red line” and the US would act. That is exactly what Assad did. President Obama’s response was to do nothing – confirming that under his leadership, even when the US talked tough it acted weak. In global politics such weakness has real consequences. When Russia invaded and took control of a large chunk of a sovereign European nation – Ukraine – in 2014, the US simply stood by, betraying assurances given to the Ukrainians in 1994 that if they gave up their nuclear weapons the US would guarantee the country’s “existing borders”. Not only did he refuse to honour that guarantee, President Obama refused to supply the Ukrainians with arms to defend themselves against the Russian invaders. President Putin invaded Ukraine because he knew that the US was unwilling to defend its allies.

GETTY US President Barack Obama with Isreali Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and John Kerry

Barack Obama in pictures Thu, November 24, 2016 Barack Obama, President of the United States in pictures Play slideshow REUTERS 1 of 130 U.S. President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama serve Thanksgiving dinner to residents of AFRH in Washington

That knowledge has led to a resurgent Russia which is now, for the first time since the 1970s and the days of the Soviet Union, the most influential nation in the Middle East. It is striking that while President Obama has consistently betrayed and attacked the US’s long-standing allies he has prostrated himself before the US’s long-term enemies. In that context, perhaps the most dangerous in a litany of disastrous mistakes has been the Obama administration’s determination to lift sanctions against Iran and allow the world’s leading sponsor of terror to wriggle free of the pressure being successfully exerted on the regime – making an Iranian nuclear weapon far more likely. Soon after taking office in 2009, President Obama shamefully betrayed the hopes of the Iranian protesters of the wouldbe Green Revolution when he pointedly refused to back their demonstrations. With the stark clarity of his silence he made it obvious to the mullahs that the US would have no issue should they choose to crack down on the protesters. Today Iran sits alongside Russia as a power in the region with its influence growing ever greater in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Whatever one thinks of his successor it’s impossible not to regard President Obama as an utterly disastrous custodian of the US’s foreign policy.

GETTY President Putin invaded Ukraine because he knew that the US was unwilling to defend its allies

Vladimir Putin in pictures Tue, December 13, 2016 Russin President Vladimir Putin in pictures Play slideshow 1 of 56