Partnerships across the world serve US well, outgoing president will say, with civilian prosecutions and rejection of torture helping to bring and keep allies

With one eye on history and the other on Donald Trump, Barack Obama plans to deliver a forceful defense of his counter-terrorism legacy.

In his final speech on war and peace as president, Obama will travel on Tuesday to MacDill air base, the home of US Special Operations Command and Central Command, to forcefully argue that his approach to the use of force is a template for an assertive but judicious response to the terrorism threat – a position under assault by both the right and the left.

While aides said the speech would not be not a direct rebuke or instruction to Trump, the president-elect’s victory ensures Obama has a successor whose stated views on counter-terrorism are either mercurial or diametrically opposed to his own.

Trump and his aides, particularly incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn, speak of Islam as the wellspring of terrorism, while Obama’s view is that jihadists attempt to hijack a religion of 1.7 billion people. Trump has waxed enthusiastic about CIA torture that Obama forbade, the Guantánamo Bay detention facility Obama failed to close, and ending the civilian prosecutions of terrorism captives that Obama favors. While both Obama and Trump prefer air power to ground wars, Trump favors bombing “the shit out of them” to Obama’s drone strikes.

In Tampa, Obama “will once again be reiterating that our greatest strength against terrorism is who we are as a country, our values, our vision of the world, and also the world that we’ve built as Americans – this international order we’ve built, where we have alliances and institutions and the rule of law”, said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser and speechwriter who has been perhaps Obama’s most trusted foreign policy aide.



Much of the speech will defend Obama’s record on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which he inherited, and both of which he will hand over to Trump.

In Afghanistan, America’s longest war, Obama surged troops by more than 30,000 before drawing down to 8,400 amid an unresolved conflict that is drifting in the Taliban’s direction. In Iraq he followed through on a campaign pledge to end the US military occupation, only to restart a version of it – gradually escalating to more than 5,000 troops and daily airstrikes – after the Islamic State overran northern Iraq in 2014.

Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has expanded and institutionalized a counter-terrorism architecture worldwide that launches drone strikes and special-operations raids in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya, while sponsoring local forces for persistent ground operations. A letter Obama sent to Congress on Monday also listed hundreds of US troops sent on counter-terrorism missions in Niger and Cameroon.

Rhodes said: “The foundation he has tried to build for the next administration [is] a network of counterterrorism partnerships from south Asia to the Sahel, wherein we are going after terrorists, we’re taking direct action to dismantle terrorist networks, but we’re building partners on the ground.”

Rhodes indicated that Obama would emphasize “sustainability” in counter-terrorism – a framework that concedes there is no foreseeable end to such operations – that seeks both an aggressive targeting of terrorist suspects and to avoid threat inflation.

It has not been an easy balance to strike. While Obama considers his use of force measured and proportionate, human rights advocates consider it arbitrary and unbounded, particularly concerning drone strikes and bulk surveillance, yet blinkered amidst sustained political opposition, such as the thwarted effort to close Guantánamo.

By contrast Obama’s rightwing critics consider him indecisive, half-measured and unwilling to pay the necessary costs for victory. An infamous quote Obama gave suggesting Isis was a minor threat – “If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” he told the New Yorker months before Isis overran Mosul – caused many conservatives to believe Obama was incapable of seeing the full scope and persistence of terrorism.

Rhodes continued: “Part of sustainability is not having an overextension of our military, not having deployments on the scale he had when he took office, but it also depends upon a range of other factors. It depends upon our ability to have an appropriate appreciation of the threat that takes it as seriously as the president has, but does not overstate the threat in ways that cause us to make poor decisions.”

With Trump musing about bringing back torture, Obama will forcefully defend torture-free interrogations and prosecutions in civilian courts as a positive sum counter-terrorism effort, delivering on both international cooperation and the rule of law.

“We’ve not lost anything from that approach, and we’ve gained a lot,” said Rhodes. “We’ve gained international cooperation from countries that are more willing to turn people over because they know what’s going to happen to them.”