The One-Minute Guide to Obama's Foreign Policy

The One-Minute Guide to Obama’s Foreign Policy

We who follow U.S. foreign policy, and especially the Middle East, sometimes get asked whether Barack Obama is a community organizing naïf way out of his depth or a brilliant ideologue who knows exactly what he is doing.

Is he inept or purposeful? Does he see his foreign policy as a failure or a success? My reply:

Not one or the other but a bit of both. He is a leftist who sees the imperialism, militarism, and corporate greed of the United States as a menace to the outside world. He conceives of his role being to reach out to enemies, reduce America’s cowboy ways, make it one of the pack, and render the world a safer place.

But he is also the president on whose watch we find not security but anarchy and despotism. Reduced American influence has led to revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt; renewed civil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; conflagrations in Libya, Yemen, and Syria; Russian military intervention; and unfathomable future troubles from a nuclear Iran.

In other words, Obama’s policy is purposeful but the consequences are not.

Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum.

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Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes, a historian, has led the Middle East Forum since its founding in 1994 and currently serves as chairman on the board of directors. He taught at Chicago, Harvard, Pepperdine, and the U.S. Naval War College. He served in five U.S. administrations, received two presidential appointments, and testified before many congressional committees. The author of 16 books on the Middle East, Islam, and other topics, Mr. Pipes writes a column for the Washington Times and the Spectator; his work has been translated into 39 languages. DanielPipes.org contains an archive of his writings and media appearances; he tweets at @DanielPipes. He received both his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard. The Washington Post deems him “perhaps the most prominent U.S. scholar on radical Islam.” Al-Qaeda invited Mr. Pipes to convert and Edward Said called him an “Orientalist.”