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Forums - Politics Discussion - Was Obama America's weakest president yet?

-Lost Philippines and losing Turkey as allies, others are now slowly starting to look for alternatives

-Unwilling to stop Russian aggression from the Baltics to Georgia

-China grows stronger and demands the South China Sea

-Let the Syrian mess grow bigger by not intervening(no oil in Syria so don't bother like Libya?)

 

It seems America isn't assertive anymore and losing it's position in the world.



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I'm quite happy with a US President who doesn't throw his weight around. Obama seems like a nice guy, and he's pretty popular and influential on the world stage.

Also as a (european-style) right-winger I believe in small government. That means a Government that doesn't try to do too much flashy stuff. Obama was quiet and seemed in control from outside the US at least.



So because President Obama is cautious on starting wars, he is the weakest president? Um... what?



Praise the One.

I really don't feel like explaining why I disagree with this in detail, so I'll just say:

 

No. 



no, it takes a whole lot of strength to realize and follow through on the strategy used in Syria

foreign troops, especially americans, wouldn't ever be able to install a stable government in the region, so they had to play the long game and let regional powers deal with that in order to achieve long term peace

in the short term that meant the threat of Isis appeared bigger than it actually was though and weakwilled idiots would've made the same mistakes as in Iraq



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I think Obama has been a good President.

Maybe not the left wing version of Ronald Reagan as pretended to be...

 

 

World is simply moving to being unipolar to multipolar so the days of the 80's and 90's of "born in the USA" are gone. 



Obama started wars in Libya and Syria by bombing the rulers and supporting "rebels", results are worse than Bush's wars.

Obama also accumulated more debt than all presidents before him combined. It is now at 165K per taxpayer.

The rest is mostly noise and can be changed by later Presidents.



Lafiel said:
foreign troops ... wouldn't ever be able to install a stable government in the region

 

This.  Also, I'd add that we've seen a number of countries where the West has intervened, and has not intervened.  We can now see empirically that there isn't an easy choice.  50% of the time things sort themselves out anyway, and only 50% of the time does intervention seem to have made things better.

I do feel bad for the US though, as there is no correct answer.  They will get blamed whichever choice they make!  We should have stopped Syria getting this bad though...



numberwang said:
Obama started wars in Libya and Syria by bombing the rulers and supporting "rebels", results are worse than Bush's wars.

Erm.  That's pretty revisionist.  The instability basically spread from within post-invasion Iraq fragmentation.  Syria and Libya were always countries with weak leadership.  You'll be hard pushed to argue that ISIS isn't in some way related to the Iraq invasion.

 



numberwang said:

Obama also accumulated more debt than all presidents before him combined. It is now at 165K per taxpayer.

The bail out of the banks was a needed step and one voted for in the senate, signed by Bush just before the end of his term so majority the debt was in Obama's presidential campaign. That isn't really an Obama thing, that was a world problem at the time and would have been done regardless the leader.



Hmm, pie.