Obama Bequeaths a More Dangerous World

The CIA also put in play salacious rumors about the Kremlin blackmailing Trump over a supposed video of him cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. And, according to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. counterintelligence agents investigated communications between retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's national security adviser, and Russian officials. In the New McCarthyism that now surrounds the New Cold War, any conversation with Russians apparently puts an American under suspicion for treason.

The anti-Russian frenzy also pulled in The New York Times, The Washington Post and virtually the entire mainstream media, which now treat any dissent from the official U.S. narratives condemning Moscow as prima facie evidence that you are part of a Russian propaganda apparatus. Even some "progressive" publications have joined this stampede because they so despise Trump that they will tout any accusation to damage his presidency.

Besides raising serious concerns about civil liberties and freedom of association, Obama's end-of-term anti-Russian hysteria may be leading the Democratic Party into supplanting the Republicans as America's leading pro-war party allied with neocons, liberal hawks, the CIA and the Military-Industrial Complex -- in opposition to President Trump's less belligerent approach toward Russia.

This "trading places" moment over which party is the bigger warmonger could be another profound part of Obama's legacy, presenting a crisis for pro-peace Democrats as the Trump presidency unfolds.

The Real Obama

Yet, one of the mysteries of Obama is whether he was always a closet hawk who just let his true colors show over the course of his eight years in office or whether he was a weak executive who desperately wanted to belong to the Washington establishment and underwent a gradual submission to achieve that acceptance.

I know some Obama watchers favor the first answer, that he simply bamboozled people into thinking that he was an agent for foreign policy change when he was always a stealth warmonger. But I tend to take the second position. To me, Obama was a person who -- despite his intelligence, eloquence and accomplishments -- was never accepted by America's predominantly white establishment.

Because he was a black male raised in a white family and in a white-dominated society, Obama understood that he never really belonged. But Obama desperately wanted to be part of that power structure of well-dressed, well-schooled and well-connected elites who moved with such confidence within the economic-political system.

An instructive moment came in 2014 when Obama was under sustained criticism for his refusal to bomb the Syrian military after a sarin gas attack outside Damascus that was initially blamed on the government though later evidence suggested that it was a provocation committed by Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate.

Despite the uncertainty about who was responsible, the neocons and liberal hawks deemed Obama "weak" for not ordering the bombing strike to enforce his "red line" against chemical weapons use.

In a 2016 article in The Atlantic, Obama cited his sarin decision as a moment when he resisted the Washington "playbook" that usually favors a military response. The article also reported that Obama had been informed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that there was no "slam dunk" evidence pinning the attack on the Syrian military. Yet, still Obama came under intense pressure to strike.

A leader of this pressure campaign was neocon ideologue Robert Kagan, an architect of the Iraq War and the husband of Assistant Secretary of State Nuland. Kagan penned a long essay in The New Republic entitled "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire." A subsequent New York Times article observed that Kagan "depicted President Obama as presiding over an inward turn by the United States that threatened the global order and broke with more than 70 years of American presidents and precedence."

Obama was so sensitive to this criticism that he modified his speech to the West Point graduation and "even invited Mr. Kagan to lunch to compare world views," the Times reported. A source familiar with that conversation described it to me as a "meeting of equals." Kagan "called for Mr. Obama to resist a popular pull toward making the United States a nation without larger responsibilities, and to reassume the more muscular approach to the world out of vogue in Washington since the war in Iraq drained the country of its appetite for intervention," the Times article read.

So, Obama's subservience to the neocons and liberal hawks may have begun as a case of an inexperienced president getting outmaneuvered by rivals whom he had foolishly empowered. But Obama's descent into a full-scale New Cold Warrior by the end of his second term suggests that he was no longer an overpowered naif but someone who had become a committed convert.

How Obama reached that point may be less significant than the fact that he did. Thus, the world that President Obama bequeaths to President Trump may not have all the same dangers that Bush left to Obama but the post-Obama world has hazards that Obama did more to create than to resolve -- and some of the new risks may be even scarier.

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