I’ve been mulling over the following question: how did each of the modern presidents from Nixon to present impact the world the most?
Richard Nixon: Opening relations with the People’s Republic of China.
Gerald Ford: The Helsinki Accords. The human rights plank encouraged the growing dissident movements in the Eastern Bloc. They took seriously what the Soviets were willing to put on paper in the albeit non-binding resolution.
Jimmy Carter: Enabling the Islamic totalitarian revolution in Iran.
Ronald Reagan: Fomenting the end of the Cold War. “Reagan bolstered the U.S. military might to ruin the Soviet economy, and he achieved his goal” – Gennady Gerasimov
George H. W. Bush: This may be a controversial choice, but I’m going with the “New World Order” speech, or rather what it represents – encouraging the United Nations to take a more active role in foreign relations. One of the legacies of the UN is the enshrinement of the ethic that wars must never be won, only fought to the point of ceasefire.
Bill Clinton: Granting the People’s Republic of China access to supercomputer technology vital to targeting manned, unmanned, and munitions-bearing rocketry. It’s the one great leap forward in China that actually worked.
George W. Bush: The Iraq War. Aside from altering the geopolitical landscape in the region, it convinced Muhammar Qaddafi to cooperate with the US to end Libya’s WMD program.
Barack Obama: Opening Iran to financial markets, thus magnifying its ability to conduct proxy wars.
Donald Trump (first term): It may be a bit early to gauge the legacy of the Abraham Accords, but opening the door to Israeli cooperation with some of its Arab neighbors is bound to have significant impact on Iran’s regional ascendency. It also breaks from the stupid tradition that any negotiations between Israel and any of its neighbors must include the Palestinians, as if Palestinian and non-Palestinian relations can’t be delt with separately.
Joe Biden: Opening Iran to financial markets, thus magnifying its ability to conduct proxy wars – assuming the Ukraine Missile Crisis does not top this. (Our own Trent Telenko is cited in the linked article.)
12 thoughts on “Making Their Mark on the World”
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It’s a fun exercise and tracing each of these threads to “How big was this in the long run?” seems valuable. I will note that these are how each president influenced the world at large and an entirely different list could be made of how each changed America itself.
I think you are right about GHWB but I don’t know that I would consider his impact primarily in terms of the UN. That was likely an outgrowth of the vision the Global Pax Americana could be sustained despite the absence of a threat like the former Soviet Union. It would only work if the “End of History” was actually true, and we could spin down our defense budget to be in line with the actual economic benefit of globalization to our economy by only having deal with the odd rouge state like the NorKs. That was shattered on 9/11 and then finally blown up by Obama’s quixote and counter-productive quest to fix the Middle East by empowering Iran.
I think the most important mark made upon the United States was the GHWB and Clinton NAFTA project. That led to the slow-motion disembowelment of the US economy to such an extent that the country cannot even produce enough weaponry and ammunition to successfully compete with the Russian shard of the former Soviet Union. Pathetic.
Since destroying the economy of the United States- once overwhelmingly dominant both technologically and economically- has vastly changed the global balance of power, I’d say that was the most important mark made upon the world by recent presidents.
But to be fair, most of those people were nothing more than minions of the globalist regime who pretty much did what they were told, which was also in their personal best interest, all in the furtherance of the globalist project they all apparently believed in. Except for Reagan and Trump, that is.
Also, I don’t care about Iran. If our trillion dollar military can’t protect us from that far away country what good is it?
Bill Clinton: Opening normal trade relations with China. I think this was largely motivated by the idea that China was a vast potential market for the US (‘If we can just sell our product to 2% of the people in China’), and there was little understanding of how rapidly the Chinese would be able to compete with US companies as *suppliers*…and manufacturing wasn’t considered all that fashionable, anyhow.
I think the China rapprochment was all it was cracked up to be, and thats being charitable, China sponsored the Khmer Rouge, which were driven out after three years by Vietnam if memory serves, it legitimated the Marxist vision, this was part of the long term project that Pilsbury* calls the 100 year war, they were drivers of the Pakistani nuclear program, as well as the North Koreans and they planted seeds as far west as Libya,
Yes the Gulf War was also another fail, Saddam was a minor threat as compared to the Iranian regime whose principal tools are the Revolutionary Guard Corps, who created Hezbollah and nurtured the Houthis, how did certain citizens of Kuwait and the Kingdom pay us back,
with the Clintons the CRA revisions as well as the nudging of the banks, generated the subprime crisis, and this particular butterfly, nearly took down the World Economy in 2008,
or certainly knocked it down a peg,
then we come to W and the handling of the twin expeditions into Iraq and Afghanistan, for
Iraq ‘it may be too soon to tell’ although my note above stands, certainly terrorism was not notably deterred, of the Sunni variety, re Afghanistan, the Kabul capitulations, well they punctuated the folly of how that expedition was managed,
The succession of general’s of the week in Iraq and Afghanistan shows that Bush et al had no real idea what came after the bombs stopped dropping. So they tried to sub it out to the Pentagon. Colin Powell never said anything truer than when he said the only thing an army does efficiently is kill people and break things. This seems to come up in every administration.
I don’t know if one can say Carter “Enabled” the Islamic revolution – if he had helped the Shah would it have made a difference? I often think of the Left’s outrage at his Secret Police but virtually silent (along with the “Feminists”) of how people are treated there today.
I read a few weeks ago – in a WSJ OP-Ed? that Carter’s lasting imprint was deregulation.
I would alter the parts of Clinton and George W Bush in order to bring them each within an overarching framework
More than the first George Bush, Clinton was the one responsible for the implementation of the “End of History” where through multilateral institutions, people wanting to be like us, and just buying the world a Coke Pax Americana could be achieved. There were some bumps in the road like Rwanda and the Serbs had to bombed over Kosovo but those were just the dying atavistic responses of a barbaric past. Russia? China? They just wanted to be like us, rich democracies all. Our foreign policy read like a Tom Clancy novel of the period, a combination of bringing the rest of the world into the light while dealing with some “rogue states” (remember them?)
George W. Bush thought the problems of the world could be solved, the process of making everyone like us sped up, by using our soft and military power to make the world democratic. Just as under the Biden Administration one of the most corrupt and gangster-ridden countries on Earth, Ukraine, became a shining symbol of liberal democracy to fit our agenda so did an even more corrupt country, Afghanistan, rose to mythical status under Bush through “Three Cups of Tea” and voters dipping their fingers into purple ink. 20 years and it all disappeared within a few months. Mark my words
The only good thing about all of that is that when you are world’s hyperpower you can engage in such foolishness. Not now. The lesson for the second go-around for Trump, as far as foreign policy, is that history never went away. Btw… to people on the Left who were so big on fighting for democracy here and rights around the world, they cared more about the LGBT alphabet people than their own natural rights (freedom of speech)
Trump’s legacy will be to bring American foreign policy back into the era of great power politics within a multilateral world.
We will see the accession of China into WTO, in its post-Tienanmen state, as one of the gravest foreign policy mistakes we have made . Even before Xi came it was bad deal. Yet there was money to be made right?
Joe Biden perhaps most strongly influenced world events by the manner of the exit from Afghanistan. That projection of careless weakness provoked the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Russian/Chinese and now also Iranian/North Korean alignment of interests manifesting in coordinated actions in the military, economic, and geopolitical spheres.
It is significant that his policy marked a return to the Obama unstated alliance with Iran and Qatar and undermining of Israel and Saudi Arabia, but the greater geopolitical catastrophe most unique to that administration resulted from abandoning Afghanistan in a most disasterous manner, undermining confidence in allies, and leaving considerable military assets as well as access to a strategic air base for no discernible advantage to the national interest.
“Gerald Ford: The Helsinki Accords. The human rights plank encouraged the growing dissident movements in the Eastern Bloc.”
Ironic because IIRC, Ford’s campaign flatlined after he said in a debate that Poland was not oppressed by the USSR.
Nixon: ending the link between the US dollar and gold
Trump 1 really should be about making immigration a major issue. This prompted the left (and Biden) to go full open borders. Which triggered the start of a radical political realignment in 2024. If this tend continues, it will reduce the Dems to FDR era Republicans.