Although Obama campaigned as a man of peace and advocated for a more peaceful foreign policy, his actual 8 year record is anything but peaceful. Obama famously gave a speech saying that he was “opposed to dumb wars”. Well, Obama lied and many died and he apparently doesn't believe that HIS wars were dumb wars.
The Nobel Peace Prize winning president astoundingly dropped over 26,000 in 2016 alone, his last year as president, here.
Democrats and liberals may cling to the delusion that Obama's foreign policy was brilliantly peaceful but Obama geographically outperformed George W. Bush when it came to expanding military operations by bombing and intervening in even more nations. Obama's foreign policy legacy includes operations in 7 countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
None of these countries posed a national security threat to the US and all are Muslim majority nations. While Republican wingnuts accuse Obama of actually being a Muslim (he's not), Obama's record on destroying Muslim lands and killing Muslims is pretty horrific.
According to the very liberal The Atlantic, there were 3 theaters of US military operations when Obama assumed the presidency in 2009 - Afghanistan and Iraq both had troops and Pakistan was targeted with drone strikes. By 2016, Obama expanded military operations to include Syria, Libya and several nations in Africa and few Americans even knew what we were doing in Africa.
Vox ran a piece in October, 2017 on the expanding US military presence in Africa that began under George W. Bush and continued under Obama and Trump.
The Pentagon is rapidly expanding its presence in Africa and is now engaged in military operations — including active combat — in more than half a dozen African countries....Does anybody even know what the hell is going on in Africa and has been going on through 3 presidential administrations? No!! Does anybody even know why Obama disastrously intervened in Syria or Libya while substantially destroying both nations? NO!!
US forces have also regularly conducted raids and other missions in Chad, Cameroon, Uganda, and, of course, Niger, where there are at least 800 American troops deployed.
The missions rely on a broad array of legal authorities but have one particularly important thing in common: They have never been specifically authorized by Congress, let alone discussed and debated by the American public. Huge questions exist as to the strategic importance and relevance of all these missions, and whether they improve US national security enough to justify the high cost in blood and treasure. Since 2001, at least 36 soldiers have died conducting or supporting military operations in Africa, including Sgt. La David Johnson and the three others killed in Niger earlier this month....
.....the US has been working with governments in heavily Muslim West Africa to counter local Islamist groups since the George W. Bush administration. The US presence there ramped up considerably under the Obama administration...
US military bases are strung around the world like an octopus.
Click the link source to enlarge: https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2013/06/fo1029_usbases12001.gif
The 2016 presidential election put the foreign policy establishment in meltdown mode as Trump continuously hammered US foreign policy. The foreign policy elites never expected Hillary Clinton to lose but they still felt extremely exposed, and to the point that they actually began attacking each other and some of it is downright hilarious. Foreign Policy Magazine, a rabid neocon mouthpiece owned by the Washington Post, outright attacked Ben Rhodes, an Obama Deputy National Security Advisor, with a blistering piece titled:
A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president’s foreign policy guru
Rhodes comes off like a real asshole. This is not a matter of politics — I have voted for Obama twice. Nor do I mind Rhodes’s contempt for many political reporters: “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little schmuck. This quotation seems to capture his worldview: “He referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.” Blowing off Robert Gates takes nerve.
Rhodes and others around Obama keep on talking about doing all this novel thinking, playing from a new playbook, bucking the establishment thinking. But if that is the case, why have they given so much foreign policy power to two career hacks who never have had an original thought? I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. I guess the answer can only be that those two are puppets, and (as in Biden’s case) are given losing propositions like Iraq to handle.
LOL, that is seriously brutal and that piece was written BEFORE Trump was even elected. These days, the entire foreign policy establishment is bipolar manic depressive and they just can't figure out why all their seemingly brilliant knuckleheads have failed miserably.
In any event, Obama and the Dems did massively ratchet up deadly foreign interventions. Hillary ran on Obama's foreign policy, a foreign policy that she had a hand in crafting.
One thing is certain - the American people are finally fed up with neocon foreign policy and want a change. Trump is just the guy to do it and he's got an awesome opportunity to get it right so long as he ignores the freaking neocons in his own administration.
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