It seems like everyone thinks that the US just gave away Crimea. My memory is that one of Obama's biggest mandates he was elected upon...was to get us out of endless overseas wars....since he inherited 2 major ones from W. Remember also that he won the Nobel Peace Prize....there was very little incentive for Obama …
It seems like everyone thinks that the US just gave away Crimea. My memory is that one of Obama's biggest mandates he was elected upon...was to get us out of endless overseas wars....since he inherited 2 major ones from W. Remember also that he won the Nobel Peace Prize....there was very little incentive for Obama to go to war...and I think a large part of our country was ok with that...at the time. He could have done more with his support of Ukraine but I think he was erring on the side of caution.
Too often we look at history with our current circumstances in mind. Obama had a fully different set of circumstances...
I didn't vote for Obama by the way...but my respect for him has increased a lot in the past 5 years....and I never hated him like so many of the MAGAs do.
Obama started his presidency with a surge against the Taliban, and then switched to a focus on training the Afghan military. He ended with a military campaign against ISIS (having secured assistance from many allies) that cut back the caliphate by about half before he left office. That's conveniently ignored by the Republicans who say he capitulated everywhere.
Trump pulled out of Syria, leaving it open to Russian control and abandoning our Kurdish allies to Turkish attack. He made a deal with the Taliban that legitimized and materially boosted them, and then started the process of learning Afghanistan to them. He wanted to withdraw all U.S. troops abruptly from various other places before he left office. That's conveniently ignored by the Trumpers, who claim he was super-tough and would never let the bad guys win.
They want to have it both ways, though. They like to boast that Trump didn't get us into any new wars, that he brought the troops home, etc. -- oh, but he wouldn't really have brought them all home from Afghanistan, and he would have stopped the Russians from attacking Ukraine, and he understand the importance of asserting American power, and he would never have left a vacuum anywhere.
Obama was more pragmatic than right-wing ideologues will admit, while Trump was more inconsistent and erratic than his devotees will ever acknowledge.
In Obama's defense...
It seems like everyone thinks that the US just gave away Crimea. My memory is that one of Obama's biggest mandates he was elected upon...was to get us out of endless overseas wars....since he inherited 2 major ones from W. Remember also that he won the Nobel Peace Prize....there was very little incentive for Obama to go to war...and I think a large part of our country was ok with that...at the time. He could have done more with his support of Ukraine but I think he was erring on the side of caution.
Too often we look at history with our current circumstances in mind. Obama had a fully different set of circumstances...
I didn't vote for Obama by the way...but my respect for him has increased a lot in the past 5 years....and I never hated him like so many of the MAGAs do.
I also didn't vote for Obama, but I'm now judging him in a less partisan way than I used to.
Obama started his presidency with a surge against the Taliban, and then switched to a focus on training the Afghan military. He ended with a military campaign against ISIS (having secured assistance from many allies) that cut back the caliphate by about half before he left office. That's conveniently ignored by the Republicans who say he capitulated everywhere.
Trump pulled out of Syria, leaving it open to Russian control and abandoning our Kurdish allies to Turkish attack. He made a deal with the Taliban that legitimized and materially boosted them, and then started the process of learning Afghanistan to them. He wanted to withdraw all U.S. troops abruptly from various other places before he left office. That's conveniently ignored by the Trumpers, who claim he was super-tough and would never let the bad guys win.
They want to have it both ways, though. They like to boast that Trump didn't get us into any new wars, that he brought the troops home, etc. -- oh, but he wouldn't really have brought them all home from Afghanistan, and he would have stopped the Russians from attacking Ukraine, and he understand the importance of asserting American power, and he would never have left a vacuum anywhere.
Obama was more pragmatic than right-wing ideologues will admit, while Trump was more inconsistent and erratic than his devotees will ever acknowledge.