How will Americans and the rest of the world remember the Obama era? Will be it associated with triumphant LGBT marches, marriage equality, America’s healthcare reform or Edward Snowden's exposure of the NSA's global spying network, growing inequality in wealth distribution in the US or a surge of racial tension?
"Barack Obama must — must — spend time daydreaming nowadays about the old rallies, the ferocious belief of his original volunteers, the millions of tiny, happily given donations that added up to such record-breaking sums, the ecstatic stupefaction he was once able to provoke just by walking out onto a stage and standing there," wrote Canadian journalist Neil Macdonald in 2014.
During his presidential campaign Barack Obama made a lot of promises – evidently, much more than he could actually fulfill. According to independent fact-checking journalism website PolitiFact, around 120 of Obama's promises still remain unkept.
The journalist draws a list of what he perceived to be Obama's legacy, pointing to police militarization, "closing down the office tasked with closing down Gitmo [Guantanamo]," a renewal of the Patriot Act which was passed after the 9/11 attacks and gave US intelligence agencies almost unlimited power to collect data through Internet and phone records, prosecution of whistleblowers, and particularly, former CIA employee Edward Snowden, who told the truth about the NSA's global surveillance.
And that is not all. Barack Obama has already fallen into the category of America's worst wartime presidents along with Woodrow Wilson, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and his predecessor George W. Bush, according to Robert W. Merry, a US author and political analyst.
Barack Obama vowed to end America's longstanding and expensive military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq which cost the US roughly $45 billion a year from 2001 to 2013, and about $100 billion a year from 2003 to 2011, respectively. However, the situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and the surrounding region became worse under Obama's presidency, experts point out.
Moreover, under the Obama presidency the world has been faced again with the threat of a new Cold War. The Obama administration contributed a lot to the ousting of pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich and supported the illegitimate coup of February 2014 in Kiev.
After that Washington has done whatever it takes to alienate Russia from the West and to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the Russo-American reset enthusiastically announced by then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009. Predictably, the US’ current warmongering rhetoric toward Russia sparks concerns among political experts.
"There is a long history of the United States of America being the global military aggressor, so a real fear and concern that all of us on this earth should have is that World War III does not break out soon, but it's kind of heading that way based on the rhetoric that we're hearing particularly from the American government," US investigative journalist Joachim Hagopian emphasized.
What makes matters even worse, US President Barack Obama has not raised a finger to resolve the tensions, vexing and bullying both Russia and China, America's other geopolitical competitor, experts note.
Whatever the Obama era will be remembered for, it is clear now that the 44th President of the United States will leave a very controversial legacy the next president of the United States will have to deal with.
