Matt Johnson

*This article was originally published in The Topeka Capital-Journal, July 9, 2016. 

Barack Obama didn’t want to be a foreign policy president. He wanted to pass health care reform. He wanted to guide the U.S. toward energy independence and combat climate change. He wanted to extricate his country from a recession that cost 8.4 million Americans their jobs and pass meaningful financial regulation to prevent a similar economic catastrophe.

When Obama was a candidate in 2008, he promised to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan and Iraq 16 months into his first term. Instead, he authorized a 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan at the end of 2009 and failed to pull out of Iraq until December 2011. And the specter of these wars still hangs over him. On Tuesday, Obama announced that 8,400 American military personnel will stay in Afghanistan until 2017. Meanwhile, the U.S. has conducted 12,000 airstrikes against the Islamic State since August 2014 and more than 5,000 troops are now stationed in Iraq (a number that grows with each new report).

In one sense, Obama’s foreign policy compromises during his first term demonstrated his integrity. He took office with a resolute plan to be the president who ended the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and there was tremendous political pressure to do so – but he was honest enough to admit that these lofty ambitions were subordinate to tactical reality. In another sense, Obama’s reluctant capitulations in the Middle East and Central Asia (as well as his much-derided decision to intervene in Libya) exhausted his already-weak desire for interventionism.

Read the full article in The Topeka Capital-Journal.