President Obama is proud of delivering the socialist mantra to entrepreneurs that their success in life was fashioned not through their own hard work, but ultimately through the critical contribution of infrastructure and faceless laborers who are owed the redistribution of the success. “You didn’t build that- someone else made that happen!”, the quote by which his admonition to capitalists and personal economic philosophic view was revealed.  Well, when it comes to the current unfolding multiply layered international calamity that has transpired since President Obama took office in January, 2009, the verdict of history is already clear.  You did build that, President Obama- That was you, and you alone.

President Obama made the mistake of confusing the potentially appropriate foreign policy argument that the international role the United States was playing had grown beyond its perceived national interests, with the argument that the United States role as global world leader in the twentieth century had nothing to do with world stability.  In other words he had taken the socialist domestic argument and extended it to the international arena.  The United States had not built world stability.  Its very presence had exasperated natural regional aspirations and allowed the United States to “take advantage” of the rest of the world and reap undeserved benefits. The United States needed to recognize its role of being only one of many nations, and accept its consignment to “improve” the world through fairer redistribution of resources through participation in climate change and World Banking and Justice initiatives.

On the domestic front, the philosophic vision of the President has led to predictable economic stagnation, worsening of conditions for the most vulnerable, and progressive mountains of debt.  On the international front, the vision is leading ominously to something substantially more serious.

It was quoted recently that the only two countries that it could be suggested under the Obama Doctrine to have developed improved relationships with the United States are communist Cuba and the leading supporter of international terrorism, the theocratic dictatorship of Iran.  The rest of the world, sensing the effects of the vacuum left behind by the withdrawal of the steadying presence of US influence, has disintegrated into an appalling mess.  China, noting the weakness of American resolve, has expanded its prosperity sphere into the international waters of the South China Sea and is militarily pressing against the sovereign lands of Japan and Vietnam, and looking to bully the Philippines and Australia.  Russia, having reversed its attempt to create a modern diversified economy and having stamped out the nascent elements of democracy, now feels free to use its time honored hegemonistic tactics against its surrounding states of Georgia and Ukraine, and soon, the Baltics, risking seventy years of relative peace in Europe.  The carefully tendered relationships the United States built up with Europe and the Pacific Rim countries, based on the fundamental trust they felt in being able to count upon the US at a moment of crisis has dissolved.

Nothing compares to the affect the Obama Doctrine has had on the Middle East and North Africa.  The fundamental belief by all the players in the region that the United States would work as a stabilizing force and not leave allies exposed has dissolved in a pit of calamity.  The US acted to demolish the tyrant Qaddafi in Libya without any plan to secure a stable outcome post removal.  The country is now a warlord paradise threatened with the ultimate warlord ISIS being positioned to gain all of Libya’s oil resources, and with it, the enormous strategic position of a dagger to the underbelly of Europe.  Egypt, the epicenter of the arab nation, and long time stabilizer under American support, is positioned as a pariah by Obama for throwing out the Muslim Brotherhood, and progressively finds itself under threat from the region’s instability.  Syria, the crossroads of ancient civilizations, is thrown into chaos by the Obama Doctrine dithering on support, then rejection, then support, and finally rejection of both the hated Assad regime and it’s equally despicable Islamist radical opponents, particularly ISIS.  Caught in the middle are the Syrian people, now approaching 500,000 dead and millions upon millions of refugees pushing into the few remaining stable havens in the region for protection and survival.  Hell has come to Syria.  Next door Iraq, declared by the Obama Administration as recently as 2011 as one of its greatest foreign policy successes, has crumbled to the brink of non-existence, and has potential to make the hell in Syria look like child’s play as Iraq degenerates into the front line of a massive Sunni-Shia fault line. With ISIS now at the gates of Baghdad, having brutally overrun one-third of the sovereign country, the government of Iraq, progressively a Quisling government of Iran, no longer counts on the US for any tactical considerations, only materials.  The many Iraqis who trusted the word of the United States, that if they took the risk of supporting a modern culturally diversified state, they could count on US protection, have discovered the ugly reality. A must read.

And finally, the sublimation of American regional interests to Iranian ones with the decision to subvert the strong control that sanctions had on the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions.  The pending agreement with Iran has reversed the policy of constraint, offered Iran economic freedom to pursue its aims in the region, and placed the remaining two American allies in the region, the world’s greatest supplier of oil, Saudi Arabia, and the region’s only stable democracy, Israel, in the Iranian cross-hairs. A conflict between these three behemoths wouldn’t stay regional for even an eye-blink.

It turns out, President Obama built this mess, and it’s the President’s legacy for the ages.  When the next President is sworn in on January, 2017, he or she is going to have an ungodly mess to deal with, and will likely have to make the brutally painfully decisions that this President has carelessly tendered upon the next.  The loss of American resolve, the loss of integrity of a nation’s word, the willingness to let the bullies win and destroy hundreds of years of human progress.  Now that is one heck of a legacy.