Stephen Staley: Barack Obama and the failure of the elite foreign policy consensus

Obama’s foreign policy was rooted in a series of false propositions: diplomacy could transcend hard power, balance was more important than taking sides, American leadership should give way to multilateral consensus, and Western values were no better than, or even inferior to, the anti-Western, anti-liberal views of our adversaries. The result was a foreign policy of moral relativism: elegant in theory, disastrous in practice. In particular, he came into office convinced that American foreign policy had tilted too warmly toward Israel and too aggressively against Iran. He sought to reset that balance. The idea was that by cooling relations with Israel and warming them with Iran, a new regional détente could emerge, one governed not by old alliances or ancient enmities but by mutual respect and diplomatic engagement. That vision ignored the region’s core realities and eschewed the obvious importance of confronting the world as it is, not as one hopes it to be. Iran was not misunderstood; it was malevolent. And Israel was not the obstacle to peace; it was the anchor of Western values and democratic resilience in a volatile region. Obama’s foreign policy team, led by men like Ben Rhodes, a failed fiction writer turned self-styled foreign policy architect, saw narrative as a tool of strategy. They mistrusted clarity, as if it were crude, and worshipped nuance, as if it were wisdom. Rhodes bragged about manipulating the press to sell the Iran deal, saying they had created an “echo chamber” in Washington. That deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), handed Iran billions in cash and sanctions relief, placing a clear bet that a genocidal, millenarian theocracy could be reasoned with. At the same time, Obama held Israel at arm’s length. He snubbed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He abstained from a key United Nations Security Council vote that condemned Israel. And he embraced the notion, long popular at the United Nations, that Israel bore the lion’s share of the blame for the region’s instability. But neither the region nor reality cooperated with this framing. The Sunni Arab states, far from embracing Iran or accepting Obama’s desired rebalancing, recoiled from Iran’s metastasizing aggression. And rather than waiting for a Palestinian resolution, they began quietly building ties with Israel. The Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, were the initial fruit of that shift: a peace built not on UN timelines or expert assumptions, but on a desire to confront shared threats with strength and resolve. It’s worth recalling that John Kerry, Obama’s secretary of state, said in 2016 that no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world was possible without resolving the Palestinian issue. Kerry and the hubristic elite foreign policy establishment he represented were wrong. What changed the region was not consensus. It was the unique alchemy of power and clarity of self-interest. Obama’s moral relativism wasn’t limited to Israel. It shaped his broader view of American power. His first major foreign policy speech, delivered in Cairo, was effectively an apology. Rather than assert America’s leadership, he opened with a trite, academic critique of it, citing colonialism, Western arrogance, and past sins. He didn’t speak as the leader of the free world, defining the future. He spoke as a university lecturer revising the past. That posture had consequences. Nowhere were they more visible than in Syria. Obama famously declared that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would cross a red line. Assad crossed it. Obama did nothing. The message to the world was clear: American warnings were just words. Walking softly while carrying no stick marked the beginning of the collapse of deterrence. It made the world doubt America. Assad continued to brutalize his people. Russia moved in to fill the vacuum. And ISIS rose in the chaos. The red line was not just a failed diplomatic ploy; it accelerated the erosion of American power and influence. Contrast that with more recent events. When Iranian-backed militias attacked American positions and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, there was no red line drawn. There was no speech delivered. There was simply action. Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top military strategist and architect of regional terror, was killed by a U.S. drone strike. One need not admire Donald Trump to recognize the relative success of his approach to the region compared to that of either Obama or Biden. In fact, the bankruptcy of the elite foreign policy consensus is laid bare by the fact that Trump, despite his manifold flaws, achieved greater strategic clarity and regional stability, simply by showing the appropriate level of respect for that consensus: none. Of course, the usual suspects voiced concern over the strike as an “escalation.” But it had one undeniable effect. Iran blinked, just as it did last month. It launched a symbolic retaliation, then de-escalated. There was no war. No spiral. Just deterrence, delivered without moral confusion. Obama’s hollowing out of Western strength was visible beyond the Middle East. It was also on display, for example, in Copenhagen in 2009, where I was present at what was supposed to be a landmark climate summit. Instead, it turned into a diplomatic embarrassment. A newly elected Obama attempted to elevate the conference into a historic breakthrough on global climate policy, grounded in the belief that climate change created a moral imperative that would unite nations. But the Chinese government had no interest in collective virtue or the priorities of the Western foreign policy elite. Premier Wen Jiabao refused to attend the final high-level negotiations, instead dispatching then-vice foreign minister He Yafei, a clear signal of how little priority Beijing assigned to the summit. It was reported that Obama, “fought desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate said, ‘No,’ over and over again.” This wasn’t simply a snub. It was a clear signal that Beijing didn’t view climate change as a shared moral mission, but as a point of leverage in a broader geopolitical contest. The West’s misplaced faith that China could be drawn into the fold by moral persuasion or diplomatic flattery was a profound misreading of Beijing’s ambitions: to expand its influence, resist American leadership, and define its own global order. The moment perfectly captured the limits of Western idealism when confronted by hard strategic calculation. This worldview, though most clearly personified by Obama, didn’t end with him; it persists. It was replicated across Western capitals, including Ottawa, where Justin Trudeau became the Platonic ideal of its hollow idealism. And Mark Carney, with his UN climate portfolio, served as its global ambassador, earnest, well-credentialed, and utterly disconnected from reality. Has anyone checked in lately on the Net-Zero Banking Alliance? Like Obama’s, their foreign policy prizes symbolism over substance, gestures over strategy. It reflects the worst habits of the elite consensus: telling the world what it ought to be, with no grasp of how it actually works. But this kind of foreign policy failure isn’t merely naive. It’s smug. It sneers at those who disagree, dismisses realism as vulgarity, and cloaks its strategic incoherence in the language of compassion and expertise. It holds itself out not just as morally correct but as socially superior, the vanguard of polite society, credentialed in Geneva and applauded in Davos. It mistakes the approval of multilateral committees for righteousness and treats dissent as something unseemly, even dangerous. That’s why its adherents recoil not just from confrontation but from those who are willing to confront. This was on full display recently when Canada’s foreign minister responded to Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities with a limp call for “de-escalation”—the diplomatic equivalent of a blank stare. It’s an expression of the old consensus’ tendency to mistake neutrality for virtue and moral abstraction for wisdom. In conflicts between free societies and regimes that brutalize, repress, or terrorize, such equivocation isn’t just amoral; it’s immoral. It empowers aggressors, undermines allies, and disguises cowardice as civility. The global disorder that emerged from this approach has proven a simple truth: the world isn’t shaped by hollow words, no matter how beautifully spoken. It is shaped by power, interest, and clarity. That truth may be uncomfortable for those who came of age in the seminar rooms and think tanks of Washington, Ottawa, and Brussels, but it’s the truth nonetheless. The Obama era and its Iran policy taught us what happens when foreign policy is guided by moral relativism and elite consensus. It taught us that adversaries aren’t neutral actors waiting to be persuaded, but ambitious regimes that exploit hesitation and weakness. It taught us that diplomacy without deterrence invites contempt. That narrative, without force, doesn’t reassure our allies; it emboldens our enemies. Last month’s attacks on Iran demonstrate the alternative, not a doctrine of retreat or self-loathing, but a clear set of ideas grounded in reality and backed by strength and confidence. These ideas hinge on supporting your allies, confronting your adversaries, and acting with purpose and resolve. This approach hasn’t perfected the world, because the world isn’t perfectable. But it has delivered stability and reduced risk, worthy goals in a dangerous world. If the West wants to arrest its decline, it must unlearn the soft superstitions of the Obama era. Malicious actors and ancient hatreds cannot be lectured away. The world must be understood as it is, confronted, and shaped by strength. Peace doesn’t come from those who mean well. It comes from those who mean what they say and act accordingly.