Frequent flyer miles don’t add up to successful foreign policy

By James Jay Carafano —— Bio and Archives May 6, 2016

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Obama has put more than a few miles on the Air Force One odometer. But travel is no guarantee of foreign policy success. Indeed, Mr. Obama is winging his way toward one of the foreign policy records compiled by any U.S. president.

Undaunted, Mr. Obama has charted an ambitious international itinerary for his last year in office. So far, he has jetted to Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe. There are more trips ahead, including June’s G-7 meeting in Japan, July’s NATO summit in Poland, September’s G-20 meeting in China and November’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru. And he’s still eyeing some history-making add-ons. Lately, for example, he been signaling that he’d like to take a tour of Tehran. At first blush, there’s nothing unusual about taking long breaks from the Oval Office during the last year of a presidency. Given the distractions of a national election, little happens in Washington. This leads lame-duck presidents to feel they have a better chance at making a final mark on foreign affairs rather than on a domestic issue. While Washington may be focused on winning reelection and getting their party’s standard-bearer into the White House next, the rest of the world remains more than willing to host the head of the world’s most powerful country. Yet Mr. Obama’s end-of-term world tour looks like anything but a victory lap. His recent visit to Saudi Arabia, for example, was more than uncomfortable.

Violence and instability has welled-up in the Middle East over the course of his presidency. On every front, conditions are worse than when he took office. Yet Mr. Obama tried to pretend that this has not seriously strained relations with most of America’s friends and allies in the region. To counter all the bad news, he still trumpets the Iran Deal—which looks increasingly insecure. Iran continues long-range missile tests and gripes about not getting enough economic benefits. Meanwhile, ISIS remains active and deadly in Syria and Iraq, forcing the White House to up its military commitments to the region. From the Middle East, it was on to Europe. In Britain, he lectured the country against voting to exit the European Union. That advice won him no friends. A subsequent poll in Britain found only four percent of respondents thought he offered the advice because “he cares about Britain.” His future world travels are unlikely to meet greater success. In Japan, for example, he will have to talk around the fact that the trade deal he negotiated—The Trans-Pacific Partnership—stands virtually no chance of being ratified before he leaves office. At the NATO summit, he will have to keep backing sanctions on Russia. It will be a painful acknowledgment that the much-ballyhooed foreign policy “achievement” of his first term—the Russian Reset—has been an abject failure.