Extracts from my article, Obama’s Legacy
From my archives
Excerpts:
“Sadly for those who believed in him, Barack Obama betrayed their trust. To the eternal regret of his well-wishers, Obama reacted to foreign policy challenges like his predecessors did – by deploying American military power to solve problems.
Those who touted Obama as a brilliant scholar will have to answer the question of how the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, managed to make him look like a clumsy, clueless, unimaginative amateur in all their encounters in the international arena.
Take the case of Syria. Obama drew a line in the Syrian desert over the use of chemical weapons.
He managed to peeve even his Western allies when acting on his threat. It was Putin who came to his rescue with an imaginative masterstroke – agreeing to ship the chemicals out of Syria.
Obama might not be the architect of the US debacle in the Middle East. Still, it was under him that Russia, and to a lesser extent China, became a major player once again in the region once considered the exclusive preserve of the US.
Observers also cannot help but note that under Obama, the US lost the respect of many once-considered solid allies. The Philippines shifted its gaze to China, with its president using very foul language in describing Obama.
Turkey and Egypt have pivoted towards Russia. Even the leader of a client state like Israel treats Obama with utter condescension.
Outwitted, outclassed, and outplayed by the Russian leader, Obama was reduced to sulking and acting like a petulant, jilted teenager. Google can help you with the picture of that contact.
It will take years before social scientists will be able to unravel the mystery of why Obama managed to scam so many people. That is essentially what he did.
There is no denying that he faced many obstacles, but if his mind had been on it, he could have accomplished much more for those who believed in him.
Sadly, the Obama illusion left the Black world reeling from colossal disappointment, and vividly recall the lamentations of the Great Sociologist W.E.B Du Bois in his Classic, “The Souls of Black Folk”: “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people – a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbound save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.”
Few men in history enjoyed the same overwhelming adulation that welcomed Barack Hussein Obama into the White House.
All over the Globe, people danced for joy when the Man who campaigned to effect a “Change we can believe in” swept into office on January 20, 2009. TV screens showed grown-up men and women openly shedding tears as they witnessed what they thought was a Miracle—a Black Man in the White House! Even veteran stalwarts like Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey wept like babies.
So great was the global expectation for peace under President Obama that the Nobel Prize Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 2009.
As Mr. Obama entered the twilight of his political career, it is only fair to assess his performance and try to answer why he chose to squander all his global goodwill and ended up leaving the world in much worse shape than he met it.
Obama’s compatriots in his country are the best judge of his domestic policies, so we shall confine our analysis to his foreign policy.
Although we in Africa claimed and welcomed him as our brother, even the most rabid Obama admirer among us will be hard-pressed to name a single thing our half-brother in the White House did for our continent in his eight years in office.
Although we do not ask or beg for handouts, it hurts to remember that our brother failed to lend a helping hand when he was the most powerful human being on earth.
Although he delivered highfalutin rhetoric in his travels across the continent, Obama leaves no enduring legacy for which we shall fondly remember him. We can contrast his lamentable legacy with those of his immediate two predecessors.
Thousands of Africans still reap benefits from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which President Bill Clinton signed into law on May 18, 2000. AGOA was an initiative to help African businesses gain entrance into the US market. As they travel on the Georg Bush Highway, Ghanaians will praise the much-maligned President George Bush Jr., who donated it to them.
It does not make us cheerful to note that while the Chinese are all over our continent building railroads, highways, air and seaports, and other economic infrastructure to lift our people out of poverty, our brother in Washington, along with his Western allies, continue to invest in the militarization of our continents—see New African's excellent coverage of the militarization of the Sahel region in the magazine’s January 2017 edition.
It is also instructive that the single most extensive US infrastructure built in Africa under Obama was the US$100million Drone facility in resource-rich but impoverished Niger – source: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/29/u-s-military-is-building-a-100-million-drone-base-in-africa/
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the US Military made its most significant inroads into Africa under our brother's rule. From a few bases a few years ago, AFRICOM today ringed our continent with more than 60 outposts – source: http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/4844
It is probably in the case of Libya that history will be most harsh on Barack Obama. We will never be told what led Obama to join France, Britain, and the Netherlands to abuse a UNSC resolution to invade and destroy the most prosperous of African nations – Libya.
Obama’s Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, was shown on TV gloating like a demented hyena over the killing of a de jure and de facto leader of an African nation: “We came, we saw, he died.”
That is an image that will forever blemish Mr. Obama, even though he called his misadventure in Libya the greatest folly of his administration.
Ok, granted, we are all capable of making mistakes, but what condemns Obama in perpetuity is his not making amends for his grievous error in killing Muammar Ghaddafi and rendering Libya a Failed State.
Ordinary people across the world, who were fed up with the social, economic, ecological, and environmental devastations neocons and neo-liberalisms engendered, believed and trusted the man with a beatific smile who promised us a change we could believe in.
Obama probably did not set out to create an enduring legacy for himself in the world at large. Still, Mr. Trump's election ensures that whatever domestic legacy he wishes to be remembered for will be speedily repudiated. At least, that much the erratic Trump has promised us…
Read the full article here: https://femi6a133.substack.com/p/obamas-legacy
©️ Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, and Social Commentator.)
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Well written, Femi. I appreciate the links you provided. Those states that open themselves to foreign bases are this willing to sell off sovereignty.