Mick Hartley

Terry Glavin looks at Obama's legacy, and the end of American power:

It was a good, long, 60-year run. It’s over.

It wasn’t George W. Bush’s fault, no matter how desperately so many people have made themselves need to believe that to be so, and no matter how the facts of the Bush administration’s many misadventures in Iraq are twisted and bent to make it appear to be so. It isn’t Trump’s fault, either.

Trump is just the loudest and ugliest piece of human detritus to tumble from the American wreckage.

Strictly speaking, it’s not simply Obama’s fault, either. But wreckage is not a word that puts too fine a point on what has become of the American republic, and of America’s standing and stature in the streets of Kyiv, in the rubble of Aleppo, in the Kremlin, in Great Hall of the People in Beijing, and in not a few NATO capitals, besides.

Unlike his loathed and uncouth Texan predecessor, Obama was an eloquent, reed-thin, 47-year-old African-American, the son of a Kenyan immigrant father who began life as a goatherd, and a mother whose forebears were European settlers in Kansas. He was a Harvard law graduate. He’d spent some of his childhood years in Indonesia. His middle name was Hussein. He was really cool.

In his Sept. 23, 2009 inaugural speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Obama pledged he would not be like Bush, who acted unilaterally and “without regard for the interests of others.” Obama’s speech was interrupted by applause, 12 times. Europe was so caught up in the excitement that the Nobel committee in Oslo awarded Obama the Peace Prize two weeks later. Obama had created a “new climate” in the world, the Nobel committee explained, and he spoke so fondly of multilateral diplomacy, and nuclear disarmament, and dialogue, and was keen to “reach out” to something called “the Muslim world,” too….

Read on. Syria, the Iran deal, Russia's re-emergence as a global power, China flexing its muscles…

The American Epoch is over. It ended on Barack Obama’s watch.