Read and vote: Is Obama making the world more dangerous?

Anne-Marie Slaughter : Virtually every foreign policy op-ed or commentary begins with the commonplace: “the world is getting more complex, difficult, and threatening.” The reason is simple. In addition to all the traditional threats that nations have had to address over centuries – war, aggression, economic coercion, territorial annexation, trade disputes, diplomatic crises – we must now also face a new generation of global threats created or magnified by the increase in the global population, the impact of human technologies, and that vast web of interconnectedness that successive waves of globalization have brought us. More concretely, leaders of countries that take responsibility for global peace and prosperity must now address traditional geopolitical issues such as tension between rising powers (China) and risen powers (the United States), arms races (Iran’s effort to acquire a nuclear weapon), and territorial aggression (Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine).

At the same time, they must address the planetary disasters and transformations being brought about by climate change, fight global pandemics, fight new kinds of war being waged by non-state actors (al-Qaeda, IS) and by old actors in new ways (cyber-war), and combat the deadly impact of global criminal networks (drug cartels, arms shipments, money laundering, human trafficking).

So now we are going to blame all this on Barack Obama? That’s like blaming a Caribbean island for a hurricane. It may be possible to fault him for many things, such as not reacting soon enough or not taking the right course of action when he did respond. But the proposition that he is the one person responsible for making the world a more dangerous place requires assuming that none of this would be happening if someone else were president. The burden on supporters of the proposition is to prove that counter-factual.

I have been a prominent critic of the Obama Administration’s policy on Syria. I have argued repeatedly that the United States and its allies, together with countries in the region under the auspices of the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, or the Gulf Cooperation Council, should have taken much stronger action, including the use of force, to change the balance in the Syrian civil war and force Bashar al-Assad and his government to the negotiating table. I have also argued that using force in Syria could send an important message to Vladimir Putin. But do we really believe that doing anything different in the Middle East would have changed Mr. Putin’s behavior in Ukraine? Mr. Putin is acting out of domestic reasons, to fan nationalist flames in Russia and build his own support. Moreover, his chief argument against the United States is that we are determined to topple regimes everywhere.

To argue that Barack Obama has emboldened his enemies and made the world a more dangerous place is to argue that a different U.S. policy would have stopped Mr. Putin, resolved the Syrian civil war, stopped Iran and Russia from funding Hezbollah and supporting Mr. Assad, and convinced Xi Jinping not to advance territorial claims in the East and South China Sea. Indeed, in the area where Mr. Obama has arguably had the greatest success, the decimation of al-Qaeda, it has had no effect on the young men flocking to join IS. The IS leaders are fanatics who are emboldened by the very efforts to stop them.

On the other side of the ledger, Mr. Obama has strengthened regional organizations and allies and convinced many other nations to play a larger part in taking responsibility for world order. And he has made more progress than any other President toward a deal on nuclear weapons with Iran. Success there is the one thing that would unambiguously make the world a safer place.

Bret Stephens : It is hard now, isn’t it, to remember the soaring global hopes Barack Obama inspired when he took office in 2009.

George W. Bush’s cowboy rhetoric was out. Smart power was in. The “dumb war” in Iraq would be ended. “The war that must be won,” as candidate Obama had called Afghanistan, would be won. The Russian Reset would bring to an end an era of needless acrimony between Moscow and Washington. A “pivot” to Asia would deter Chinese adventurism. Toward Iran, Mr. Obama offered an open hand in exchange for an unclenched fist. Al-Qaeda would be crushed.

Best of all, the United States under Mr. Obama would be loved again. Didn’t you see how they turned out for him that day in Berlin’s Tiergarten?

Six years on, here’s how things stand. The number of jihadist fighters more than doubled between 2010 and 2013 and the number of jihadist groups rose by 58 per cent, according to a RAND Corporation study. In 2009, Iran was enriching uranium in 3,900 centrifuges. By 2013, when an interim agreement froze the program in place, the number had risen to 9,000. In Iraq, the U.S. finds itself being dragged into war once again.

Meanwhile, the Taliban is undefeated. Russia threatens not only what remains of Ukraine but also NATO members such as Estonia, putting U.S. - and Canadian - security guarantees on the line. Vladimir Putin treats the U.S. with open disdain, penning cheeky and contemptuous op-eds in The New York Times denouncing Mr. Obama’s claims of American exceptionalism. The pivot to Asia has so far been mainly a feint, thanks to steep cuts in the U.S. defense budget. In Egypt, site of the overhyped and now forgotten Cairo speech in 2009, Mr. Obama has managed the unlikely feat of making himself more unpopular than George W. Bush was at the height of the Iraq war.

Those who once advocated the policies that helped bring us to this point now tell us that none of this is Mr. Obama’s fault; that the world is just a complicated, recalcitrant place. They are right - up to a point. No American president can control global events (even if few made promises as grandiose as Mr. Obama’s), and all presidents must deal with surprises, obstacles and reversals.

But Mr. Obama is unique in having invited, through a combination of inattention, incompetence and design, many of the troubles we now face. Nothing prevented Mr. Obama from inquiring as to just whose phones the National Security Agency was tapping. Nobody forced Mr. Obama to declare a chemical red line for Syria that soon enough became a crisis of U.S. credibility.

As for Iraq, it was Mr. Obama who preferred for ideological reasons to bring all U.S. troops home when he could have bargained to have at least some stay. “To this day,” laments former defense secretary Leon Panetta his recent memoir, “I believe that a small U.S. troop presence in Iraq could have effectively advised the Iraqi military on how to deal with al-Qaeda’s resurgence and the sectarian violence that has engulfed the country.”

The upshot is that the United States now finds itself in an unenviable position: its enemies do not fear it, and its friends do not trust it. The peril of squandered credibility is that, eventually, credibility can be restored only through a resort to force.

Not long ago, a noted foreign policy expert noted this: “Obama took office with the aim of ending wars, not starting them. But if the U.S. meets bullets with words, tyrants will draw their own conclusions. So will allies.” True words, and I commend Anne-Marie Slaughter for writing them. Sounds like she should be on my side of the Munk debate on Wednesday.