Barack Obama: anatomy of a failure

President George W. Bush’s place in history is already guaranteed, fixed by a series of monumental blunders that no amount of revisionism will ever be able to whitewash. By comparison, historians are likely to have a hard time drawing a bead on Barack Obama. How could such an obviously gifted President, swept into office on a wave of immense expectations, have managed to accomplish so little in his attempted management of global affairs? Over the past six years ‘Yes, we can!’ has become ‘No, he hasn’t.’ What went wrong?

Several answers to this question present themselves. The first and most important is that the expectations to which Obama–mania gave rise were from the outset utterly unrealistic. But consider this irony: the people who George W. Bush had brought to power eight years prior harboured many of those same expectations regarding the exercise of what pundits and politicians like to call American global leadership.