Barack Obama left office as a very popular President despite some obvious shortcomings. On the domestic front he was an undoubted success. Foreign policy was the area in which he was never comfortable and failed quite miserably. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, floundered on foreign policy as well.
The Middle East seems to be the world’s biggest trouble spot and the scene of the greatest American folly. The US hailed the Arab Spring and then watched its disintegration in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Tunisia and Libya. When America welcomed the Arab Spring they stuck stubbornly to the belief that democracy would finally become the norm in all these rogue states. They were strangely unable to realise that Sunni-Shia divides and thousands of years of tribalism rendered those hopes as false and even pathetic.
If you thought that American foreign policy had hit rock bottom you were wrong. Donald Trump’s blunder this week leaves Obama and Bush looking adequate by comparison.
When Trump released his bombshell statement that America would recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel he managed to alienate every US ally around the world, he gave live ammunition to every US enemy and Middle Eastern terrorist group. The Palestinians reacted exactly as Trump should have expected — they went berserk. Riots and rockets were the entirely predictable response. Five decades of sensible US policy designed to breathe life into an often-flagging peace process was jettisoned in a single moment of Presidential lunacy.
Read the full article by Graham Richardson at The Australian (subscription only).