Exactly a year from today – how could we forget? – the United States of America will elect its 45th President. Sometimes it is hard to believe the 44th, Barack Obama, is still extant. He does a better impersonation of a nonentity that any president in living memory, quite an accomplishment when one recalls Jimmy Carter.
I covered Obama’s 2008 campaign and watched with dismay as America, wounded and humiliated by the pratfalls and absurdities of the George W Bush years, fell for the smooth, stage-managed articulacy of the vacuum that Obama, even then, was. His record of unachievement should have come as no surprise.
Our Prime Minister says our future lies in Europe, so we may think it of little consequence that Mr Obama has detached America so much from the rest of the world, and that the so-called special relationship between Britain and the United States is, for now, little more than a figment of the imagination. If you seek a monument to US foreign policy look no further than the intervention of Russia in the mess in Syria and Iraq; a mess Mr Obama may not have caused, but which he has contrived to do absolutely nothing to resolve.
Given the unintended consequences of American foreign policy under George W Bush it is tempting to rejoice that America is so disengaged from international relations. But there is such a thing as a world balance of power, and America, by its inertia and (whether it admits it or not) perceived isolationism has altered it. Vladimir Putin now prevails, which, given the true state of Russian power, is preposterous and shameful: and the most pre-medieval variant of Islam imaginable stalks what we once thought of as Western civilisation. » | Simon Heffer | Saturday, November 7, 2015
