Obama seals positive legacy embracing Trump's rise: Donald take note

Yesterday, for the first time ever, Barack Obama formally met face-to-face with the leader of a counterinsurgency that has placed his legacy squarely in its cross-hairs for much of its stunning ascension to the doorstep of power.

The way the nation's first black president treated the arch-peddler of the not-so-subtly racist "birther" conspiracy theory against him is far more indicative of the likely trajectory of the monumental White House transition between now and January 20 than whatever the partisan punditry of either side has had to say in their celebratory or grieving commentary since the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Above all, it was an expression of a mature humility which goes a long way to explaining Mr. Obama's persistently high approval ratings - something which a popularity-conscious Donald Trump was sure to take note of.

Trump was impressed enough by Obama's affable professionalism to even call him "a very good man" - not quite what you'd expect of someone who's spent months and months excoriating the president as essentially the worst America's ever had (though the two polar opposite assessments aren't necessarily mutually exclusive).

Beneath all the bluff and bluster, in fact, there's good reason for Obama to believe that the better aspects of his eight-year administration won't be reversed - not so much because it'd be too difficult even for a united GOP government to do so, but because Trump of all people has no desire to swim against the tide of history.

Obama has now accepted - if merely by necessity - that his opposition to Trump and Trumpism on behalf of Hillary was, in his own words, "on the wrong side of history." Or better yet, that history itself hasn't "ended" - i.e. its final course hasn't been irrevocably fixed for one last time - as it supposedly did back in 1989. He's doubtless reassessing both his own legacy and also the broader context of where the world stands as a whole, and it must comfort him to remember that even the unstoppable long-term currents guiding the human community's common destiny don't obviate any twist or turn along the way: such detours are simply part of the journey, because they expose and thereby release underappreciated tensions or contradictions that block the way to eventual Nirvana.

His ultimate decision to stay out of the Syrian civil war was a reflection of this fundamental judgment. On this particular issue, which is widely branded as his single greatest foreign policy failure, it's interesting to note that his dovish stance actually falls short of Trump's - even if you cynically note that the latter's perception of the whole issue is colored by an apparent infatuation with Vladimir Putin.

As he takes the reins of power, The Donald may yet find that a number of Obama's "failures" were actually primarily failures of messaging and spin (ironic for an administration that has been lambasted by its opponents as running a propaganda mill in cahoots with the liberal mainstream media). In the end, however much better (or worse) he actually fares than his predecessor in tackling the republic's most vexing problems - not to mention the most pressing crises in the world at large - Trump can at least take one cue from the community organizer whose social re-engineering agenda he's ambitiously attempting to replace with a massive reconstruction project: even if you don't get your way, you can still be a gracious loser without having to overcompensate with even bigger "wins", if even primarily for your image and your own ego. Potentially very valuable insight for someone who's gaudily steamrolled over obstacles his whole life, seizing even the most mind-blowing setbacks as occasions for bragging.

It's really so simple: Obama failed to deliver, period

In its most unadulterated and undiluted essence, the Trump tidal wave was fundamentally an uprising against the prevailing ideological and policy hegemony of the post-Cold War era. And you sure didn't have to be a Republican or conservative (let alone a Trump supporter) to notice that something was afoot.

Let's just focus on Barack Obama - the hope and change candidate of eight years ago who has long since become a proxy for "the way things have become" with "the establishment" - as a bellwether for that establishment's continuity and stability, as against the swelling anti-establishment revolt which culminated in last night's historic upset.

It didn't matter, in the end, that the outgoing first black president still enjoyed 50-plus approval ratings for virtually the entire homestretch of the campaign; of far more consequence was the fact - undeniable in hindsight - that his whole agenda had already been effectively frozen dead in its tracks by the onset of the Trump campaign in mid-2015. He downplayed this by trying to keep such fiascos as Syria out of the news as much as possible, and it saved his job polls, but apparently ultimately at the cost of cementing a widespread perception among those voters looking for decisive leadership from whichever party or candidate that he'd simply checked out of a presidency he just couldn't handle anymore.

Consider that just since Trump launched his raucous run for the White House last June 16 by essentially labeling Mexicans rapists and gang-bangers, Obama has suffered the following setbacks:

1. His signature amnesty for undocumented immigrants was blocked by an uncompliant court
2. His late push for the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal was stalled by a gridlocked Congress
3. His pick for Antonin Scalia's replacement as Supreme Court Justice - a moderate specifically tailored to suit enough Republican Senators - was unceremoniously stonewalled
4. His policy of replacing brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with a transitional authority that would end that country's catastrophic five-year civil war - and usher in a liberal democracy that would buffer it against ISIS and Al Qaeda - has been systematically eviscerated by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin
5. His signature domestic achievement - the Affordable Care Act - has fallen so far short of its original promises that his administration has quite conspicuously shelved the very term "Obamacare" from its public discourse

There are other failures and reverses Obama has suffered beside these, and some date back well before Trump bombastically stole the whole show less than 18 months ago. But in the world of politics, such a string of defeats finally comes back to bite you at the end of the day - no matter how much you manage the surface perception that you're still effective as a popularly mandated leader.

Politics is ultimately not about popularity - it's about the actual exercise and execution of power. Obama has failed to deliver, period. Long before Trump blew away the extension of Obama's legacy, the brash reality TV trash-talker had already emasculated the Oval Office - by simply capitalizing on the incumbent's existing longstanding weaknesses and inflexibilities.

What we have now is regime change - in Washington, of all places. But in fact Obama had lost much of the country long before November 8, 2016 - he'd already been a rump like Assad in Syria (in the American context of course) for a while.

If you blame it on his enemies, you miss the whole point: a US president, no less than other leaders and statesmen the world over, is primarily evaluated on the actual efficacy of his rule; on that, he's underwhelmed and so has finally been overwhelmed by his antithesis.

Downed by a big Weiner? If this is politics 2016, who needs reality TV?

Even the most outlandish political satire would have a tough time rivaling the surreal developments now unfolding in the final week of the presidential race.

Who could have thought that the long-running Anthony Weiner freak show would not only keep going on and on with one lurid exposé after another for months and years on end, but that it would finally have actual fallout in the realm of power and influence?

And to think that this is all because of a 15-year-old girl he allegedly sexted last winter, knowing it was a stomp on legal thin ice? If this is American politics in 2016, who still needs reality TV?

You gotta feel for Hillary and her now disgraced aide, Weiner's ex Huma Abedin: perhaps their hubbies' private-part escapades have finally caught up with them.

Granted, there's almost certainly still no evidence of malicious wrongdoing here, and criminal prosecution remains a stretch. But the negligence of what now looks to be a deliberate habit of intentionally forwarding sensitive emails to a political ally's unsecured account reeks to high heaven. If this were anyone else, you're talking a ban from any significant public service position for a probationary period plausibly at least five years - never mind the White House and nuclear football come January 20.

So has Hillary been shot by a big fat Weiner, so close to her lifelong prize? Having survived Bill's shenanigans with women for so long, how brutal a twist of fate it would be to suffer such a late-minute meltdown on account of a far more appropriately named philanderer who just so happened to be far too close to you to not spray your own name with his juicy dissipations.

No, the Philippines isn't kicking America out for China

Brash and swashbuckling new Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte has boldly pronounced a "pivot to China" by the longtime US ally in his just concluded summit meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing, going so far as to declare that "America has lost" in its military and economic competition with the People's Republic.

But what's really going on here? Is the US really going to get kicked out by Manila? Will the latter really revoke its official mutual defense treaty with Washington dating back to the aftermath of World War II? Will this really be replaced by some kind of new security pact with China and/or Russia (to whom Duterte has also just reiterated his intent to deal with Putin)?

There's little doubt that Duterte feels far more at home with fellow strongmen Xi and Putin than with Obama - let alone his likely successor, the first woman president of the US. He's clearly impressed by their trappings of authoritarian imperial power exemplified by the grand squares of Beijing and Moscow, tailored as they are for unabashed displays of vast and intimidating formations of military troops and hardware. One can only imagine how his ego was stroked - quite consciously by his Chinese hosts - at being given special red-carpet treatment in the very visible nerve center of the middle kingdom; it must feel great for the sheriff of a comparatively puny tropical archipelago to be treated as a fellow resolved and responsible leader of men.

But Duterte knows better than to write off the US just yet. He relishes the chance to play off the superpowers against one another - magnifying the Philippines' and his own personal importance well beyond what it would be were it still firmly in the American camp. This is his way of not only hedging his bets, but making him doubly important to please or at least mollify in Washington.

In the end, it's precisely because he wants the unprecedented moral legitimacy that only the US can confer on his controversial leadership so much that Duterte is going so far as to entreat a rival suitor. He knows just how fickle is political popularity - he may have plenty of it in this "honeymoon phase" with the Filipino people, but if he somehow wins American approbation both of his policies and his underlying governance philosophy, that gives his administration a far bigger boost to its ambitious program, greatly weakening any opposition to it.

That being said, perhaps an even bigger reason the US-Filipino alliance isn't about to be terminated is a counterintuitive one: China itself doesn't want Manila to give Washington the boot - at least not for a while. In the first place, doing so would give too strong a message of of Chinese hostility to the US that would hurt Beijing's interests. No less than Duterte, Xi is also seeking American acceptance of his nation's and specifically his own personal indispensability to any Asia-Pacific policy or initiative. In large measure he already has it; but a public pivot towards China by a close US ally, however largely symbolic, serves the purpose of lightening up the dark view long peddled by some corners of official Washington that Beijing's become all about bullying its way to regional hegemony and demonstrating American decline.

It also serves China better for the Philippines to remain in the regional US alliance network than leave it because this now potentially gives Beijing a sympathetic voice at the table of America's Asian security coalition - a welcome dissenter from the confrontational faction led by Japan. Duterte is now to Xi what president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is to Putin: a key US partner holding a pivotal link in Washington's chain of strategic influence that has acquired a mind of its own. Over time, this could even encourage other American allies to behave more autonomously of Washington, as well.

There's little doubt that supplanting the US as the linchpin of the security order in Asia is China's long-term goal; but with the wind already blowing so favorably in its direction, Beijing needn't push the envelope now and jeopardize its recent gains. Conceding Filipino rights in Manila's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) - as long as it's done gradually and quietly, without publicly acknowledging the Filipino victory at The Hague's South China Sea ruling in July - will be a small price to pay for getting a foot in the door of one of the mainstays of America's presence in the Western Pacific. And eventually, if and when the US does actually cede regional hegemony to China, Chinese leaders would much prefer that it do so of its own accord - recognizing the obsolescence of its old alliances in a new Sinocentric environment, anyway - rather than feel it's being shoved out. In more ways than one, Duterte's reciprocated outreach to China is setting the tone for the coming realignment of maritime Asia.

How America's becoming polarized like Syria

One can't help but notice how life often imitates art, or even more tellingly these days, how an advanced society supposedly at the forefront of universal human harmony is beginning to uncannily resemble a very traditional one torn apart by primeval sectarianism.

What we clearly have nowadays in America - for those bold enough to call it out for what it really is - is the polarization between the cosmopolitan city and the parochial country; between progressive universal values and conservative exclusivist ones; between gender fluidity and rigid patriarchy.

Sound familiar? It's the exact kind of polarization which has violently cut a knife across the heart of Syria since the Arab spring erupted in 2011, killing up to nearly half a million in that country's subsequent civil war which has also displaced over 10 million others.

The notable difference, of course, is that our own sharpening identity-driven partisan divide is highly unlikely to turn physically bloody: our laws and institutions are far too entrenched and stable to allow that. But in the absence of a sober acknowledgement of the nature of the problem now making a mockery of our democratic process, even the most trusted and enduring features of the American system risk becoming weapons of increasingly destructive culture warfare.

Our democracy - and every society, in fact, whether democratic or undemocratic - can only properly function and attain its potential when its conflicting poles complement rather than repel each other. America surely doesn't have to descend into another civil war or anything even close to it to suffer the consequences of its deepening and ossifying division - and the entire world will be worse off for it, too.

The election lost, Trump pivots to making country ungovernable

It's obvious that Donald Trump has lost the election. Even his diehard supporters know it - in fact, his diehard supporters in particular should be aware of what's truly happening. They've consciously essentially given up winning the race, because their goal is radically shifting to something far more negative but carrying potentially far greater long-term impact: making the country ungovernable from status-quo Washington.

If the political establishment still manages to hang on with Hillary becoming president, so they reason, it's time to punish the whole rotten lot of them by permanently burning the bridges of trust between the heartland and the ruling apparatus, thus rendering the latter so paralyzed and impotent that it will eventually crumble of its own atrophy into uselessness.

Trump's role now is to personify in one body the pent-up rage felt by anywhere from one to two-fifths of the American populace: the predominantly lower middle-class and working class whites of the geographically vast but largely socioeconomically stagnant interior of the lower forty-eight. In fact, as a number of surveys have demonstrated, this hostility isn't primarily economic but cultural, even borderline racial: poverty and income levels may indeed improve in the coming years to mitigate the deepening polarization, but the overwhelming structural character of a permanent shift to a diverse and multicultural coastal elite as against a still largely homogeneous middle America (literally) could well defy any quick or resounding healing of an alarmingly ossified national division.

The silver lining of this descent into partisan, even sectarian darkness in American politics is that it leaves a victorious Hillary Clinton little room to maneuver on wedge issues that she is known for lightning-rod views on, like immigration, gun control, or religious restrictions or prerogatives. Once in office, she will be confronted with a Republican electorate seething from the prospect of a third Obama term; even with a narrowly regained Democratic majority in the Senate, she will still almost certainly face a residual if reduced GOP majority in the House - to mention nothing of the Republican advantage in state governorships. That potentially forces her into key concessions lest her presidency be hobbled by even worse gridlock than Washington has already grown semi-accustomed to. If she wants to actually govern, she may well have to slow down at least somewhat the left flank of her party from carrying on its ambitious social engineering agenda.

But neither will it be easy to run the country in the old manner of the political elite and its wealthy patrons, who one way or another are widely perceived - on both ends of the electoral spectrum - as having looked out too exclusively for their own interests by shafting everyone else. Now that the microscope will be turned on her and her family's every move, Hillary can no longer sell favors and access as she so blithely did at State, and this could have a ripple effect across the entire establishment. And if nothing else, the fact that she's been so cozy with the big bankers on Wall Street could severely constrain the financial industry lobby in Washington merely by association with the White House.

Thus, even assuming a Hillary win, the country probably isn't governable anymore in the way it's been for a while, anyway. That at least is probably something Americans of all backgrounds and persuasions shouldn't be too disappointed by.

Uh-oh: Is Obama finally blundering into a suicidal confrontation with Russia?

Tomorrow, president Obama will once more get grilled by his national security team to finally order an utterly insane strike against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, despite the clear warning that a nuke-brandishing Vladimir Putin has now given him that this would certainly draw Russia into direct military conflict with the US.

In some sense, this isn't at all surprising. With the Syrian regime - aided by stepped-up Russian airstrikes - closing steadily on liquidating the last rebel urban stronghold of Aleppo, it's becoming obvious that Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus want to deal Mr. Obama the devastating defeat of the virtual final eradication of the Syrian revolution by the time American voters choose their 45th president on November 8.

Where he had earlier hoped that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would be left to deal with the Syrian mess come January 20 - or at the very least he himself wouldn't have to until after Hillary secured the White House with her probable win next month - now Obama is staring down the very real prospect of a catastrophic strategic defeat that could reverberate thousands of miles beyond the ruins of a shattered historic Levantine city.

What makes his choice doubly more nerve-racking is the growing (day by day) ugliness of the US presidential election, as the deepest darkest dirt of both candidates is systematically unearthed by the two sides to further feed the flames of partisan polarization and acrimony. Perhaps for the first time ever, Obama is feeling a small bug nagging existential threat to his very psyche: a fear that a Trump victory now means nothing less than the utter evisceration of his legacy.

Defeat in Syria could give the election a considerable eleventh-hour jolt in that appalling direction. It would end US hopes of fostering a democratic alternative to the authoritarian brutality of Assad and his ruthless sponsors, Putin and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. By default, that's a huge victory for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other violent jihadist extremists across the entire Middle East and potentially the wider Islamic world, as well.

So will Obama finally risk it all? On balance, it's highly unlikely - at least tomorrow. Hillary's lead over Trump seems big enough to not lose sleep. A new round of Syrian ceasefire talks this weekend (in a new regional-multilateral as opposed to US-Russia bilateral format) can buy some more time. With just 26 days to go until decision '16, Obama and Hillary alike will now try to run down the clock.

But the Syrian vise may be closing on the Democrats even faster. Given the intensified Russo-Iranian-Syrian assault on Aleppo as we speak, it's difficult to avoid the impression that the West and its Sunni Muslim regional allies will simply be asked to effectively capitulate Aleppo in order to save civilians this weekend. Leaked pro-Russian and pro-Syrian reports are claiming that on-the-ground talks are already underway between the regime and less fanatical militants to evacuate the latter and their families out of the city's besieged eastern sector; if true, the weekend truce discussions will likely involve Russian pressure on the US and its Western allies to throw their weight behind the proposal. The problem? Even if Washington finally surrenders - a big if in itself - its Saudi and other Gulf Sunni allies who with arch-nemesis Iran form the Syrian conflict's most intractably partisan foreign fomenters will probably scuttle it.

That's where the latest developments in the third front of the Sunni-Shia regional sectarian war (the first two being Syria and Iraq) - Yemen - are particularly alarming and potentially a destructive powder keg.

As of yesterday, the US has officially entered the civil war in Yemen on top of the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, throwing its firepower behind the Gulf Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia against the Shia Iranian-backed Houthi rebels by launching cruise missiles against coastal Houthi radar installations that had earlier directed anti-ship attacks on US destroyers. Iran's response? The enraged ayatollahs have dispatched two warships to patrol the neighboring Gulf of Aden.

Even as the prospects of US-Iranian hostile engagement remains low - both sides have too much riding on the 2015 nuclear deal - it's now obvious that the Saudis have recently intensified their own brutal air campaign against heavily civilian Houthi targets in Yemen in revenge for the humiliations that Sunni Arab civilians have suffered in Syria at the hands of Russian and Syrian regime air power. So obvious a rat race to kill noncombatants has this become - you bomb my friends' hospitals, and I'll bomb your buddies' funeral processions - that the US is now torn between standing by its Saudi allies and trying to avoid the appearance of double standards that would taint the whole Western coalition.

So even though a US-Iran blowup in Yemen is unlikely, not only does this escalation to the far south give Secretary John Kerry that much less maneuvering room as he tries to restrain Saudi vindictiveness over Syria this weekend, but quite dangerously it opens the door to a hitherto much muted Western assertiveness against Tehran. And that's where all hell could break loose.

As the lack of Western mainstream media coverage of Iran's regional role has made clear, the Western policy and ruling elite have become so preoccupied with Russian actions and something of a negative obsession with Putin specifically that they've badly neglected the ayatollahs' calculus. Few in Washington or Western European capitals seem aware that Tehran may now be driving Moscow's regional policy more than the other way around. And all along it has actually been Iran - not Russia - which has most dramatically restricted American freedom of action in the region along with that of its allies. A tipping point may finally be approaching: having delayed (by no means truly eliminated) the Iranian bomb, the West and Western-aligned Sunni powers are now finding the price of this extra time possibly intolerably high to pay - as it gives the ayatollahs far too much leverage to escalate their sectarian agenda throughout the Middle East with only ineffective pushback.

The mere fact that the very possibility of military confrontation with Damascus and thus Moscow is back on the table in the White House betrays how dangerously the whole regional situation could be reaching the threshold of just boiling over. Barack Obama himself - the community organizer whose whole presidency has been premised on the principle that there are no military solutions in geopolitics - is perhaps finally being confronted with a stark choice. If he doesn't act decisively now - for peace or for war - then whatever peace or war comes to the Middle East will not be determined by liberal democrats or reformers, but by sectarian extremists and cutthroat Machiavellian strongmen who alternately bargain with and war with them. Either way, democracy and human rights suffer and regress; either way, the danger of a newly retrograde world existentially threatens his legacy.

If you're an optimist, you could say that the newest war talk is just that - talk. And better yet, prudent contingency planning: no good leader waits until military action is actually absolutely necessary to plot it. But with Obama, this must be weighed against something more troubling: an apparent indecisiveness that has come to define his entire foreign policy record.

In the past, great American statesmen on the world stage - think Kennedy or Reagan - staved off destructive war and achieved great victories for global stability and cooperation precisely because they did not shy away from armed confrontation, even nuclear confrontation. That's because they effectively convinced their counterparts in the Kremlin that whatever terrible price America would pay for an actual direct military conflict, Moscow's empire would suffer even more and likely far more. Without this leverage, they simply could not have dialed down the standoffs they navigated in a way that secured, let alone promoted, vital American interests.

Obama, however, projects the image of an American and general Western society that to many cynics has fundamentally lost any sense of higher ideals or values worth shedding even a single drop of blood for, let alone buckets or rivers of it. Reduced to minimalist "extend and pretend" tactics without any grand strategy of peace through strength, this ironically makes it more likely - however improbable still - that the streak of luck will finally run out; namely, that at long last a halfhearted response to crisis is judged as preferable to continuing to do nothing at all. If and when such a devastating miscalculation occurs with the outgoing 44th president, he will have nudged the free world he leads over onto a slippery slope that can only end in judgement by fire.