Remember, President Obama complained quite a bit about the problems he inherited.
The economy still creeps along more than seven years after we came out of the Great Recession.
And abroad, rather than solving the problems by getting America out of the way--justifying that Nobel Peace Prize he got for his "potential" (!)--bad stuff has happened:
It would be a fitting story to tell of the man who ascended to the presidency while simultaneously winning a Nobel Peace Prize. Obama returns America's sword to its sheath, and earns the praise of his fans and admirers. Just as he passed on a better economy to his successor than the one he inherited from Bush, so he passed on a safer world.
Unfortunately this story is a lie from end to end. The world the next president will inherit is full of traps.
Do read it all.
Although the author unnecessarily genuflects to the Left by ending with this:
President Obama was given a very difficult foreign policy situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. But his decisions in the Middle East and elsewhere have set a number of traps for the next president, while weakening our allies. And this in turn has invited other global powers to test America's historic commitments. [emphasis added]
I will remind readers that Iraq was a battlefield victory by the time President Obama took office. All he had to do was not do stupid shit to defend and exploit the gains. The administration boasted of this success before we walked away in 2011 and that JV team ISIL swarmed over northern and western Iraq in 2014.
And Afghanistan was a low-level fight during the Bush administration, where 660 American troops died in battle since 2001. President Obama tripled our troop strength and our forces suffered nearly 1,700 dead since 2009 in a campaign that he prematurely ended before the military plan of the president's escalation could be completed (which had puzzled me repeatedly).
And even if you insist that Iraq and Afghanistan were major problems unjustly passed on to President Obama, our president failed to use his big-brained and nuanced powers to resolve them. These problems too get passed on to the next president.
Hell, I'm just grateful that President Obama didn't just wash his hands of both campaigns and is able to leave the solution to the next president.
The next president will inherit quite the list of problems to deal with. Pity our current president is more skilled at dodging golf course sand traps than in solving foreign policy traps.
President Obama would have been livid to have been handed this list by such an inept predecessor.
