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Barack Obama: anatomy of a failure

The President is heir to a mistaken sense of America’s place in the world. But he has played a bad hand poorly

3 January 2015

9:00 AM

3 January 2015

9:00 AM

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.’

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Andrew J. Bacevich, currently Columbia University’s George McGovern Fellow, is writing a military history of America’s war for the greater Middle East.

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