On balance, Obama's foreign policy has done more harm than good

I hid some sick humor in this, yo. This round is a bit shorter, but I decided based on the loss of a round to not bother with extending the argument beyond the Middle East; after all, it is the most volatile situation and the biggest threat to national security at the present time.RebuttalsFramework: I proposed that good foreign policy produces situations favorable to the US in foreign countries, and Con has proposed that good foreign policy should help build up foreign countries/stabilize countries/deal with enemies peacefully. The principles that guide each of Con’s assertions contradict each other, especially the idea of dealing with enemies while somehow building them up. Stabilization is also contradictory to dealing with enemies. Even Obama’s policies of sanctions are meant to destabilize enemies, through degradation of their economies. So, I must assume that the building-up and stabilization of nations only applies to allied or neutral nations in Con’s framework. This means that Con’s framework has no conflict with my own, as building up allies is one way to produce favorable conditions (think back to the Marshall Plan, for example). That only leaves “peaceful yet blunt” as a contradiction. Con provided no justification for why foreign policy must always be peaceful--off the top of my head, I can think of at least the Korean War, the arms race of the 80’s, and the first Gulf War as examples of militaristic actions that made conditions better in foreign areas for the US--South Korea is a strong ally, the USSR went broke, and Kuwait continues to be a strong US ally as well.Iraq: I never blamed Obama for the war in Iraq; clearly, I established, “for a policy to be a failure of Obama’s, it must be something that Obama had the capacity for changing while in office.” Con has not challenged this framework. Now, the resolution weighs the harms and good of Obama’s foreign policy in itself, not as opposed to Bush. If it did, I would have lost this before it even started. Con states “the harms of Bush’s foreign policy outweigh those of Obama’s”, but this is irrelevant to the resolution. I never stated that Obama should be blamed wholly for the current state of Daesh, but that does not mean that he shouldn’t be blamed at all or even mostly. “As the president who inherited this situation, it was his job to resolve it with little to none problems, and he succeeded.” “In conclusion, when you look at the tangible evidence I have provided, withdrawing troops from Iraq was the reasonable thing to do at the time; the Iraqi military had been armed and trained extensively. It was not an error of the Obama administration, but an error by the Iraqi administration for not having the initiative to expand upon the training and equipment to form a capable fighting force.”This analysis is half true. Yes, the excesses of the Iraqi government made it easier for it to nearly collapse. However, the US did not have to support this development. Doug Bandow at The National Interest writes:“like its predecessor it also intervened too much rather than too little. For instance, President Obama continued to back Iraq’s Maliki government despite the latter’s sectarian excesses. That commitment left Washington with little leverage to press ruling Shia politicians to make concessions to disaffected Sunnis” (1).The amount money spent on them is irrelevant. It’s how that money is used. To appeal to the hip youth on this site, for example, our government spends hella cash on healthcare, but we ain’t got rhythm to show for it. Obama should have known whether or not we had progress to show for our spending, and he miscalculated.Economic Isolation: I do not contest that economic intervention is on balance a good plan. But, in weighing the impacts, the good created by this is minute. We got Iran to agree to a nuclear deal based on sanctions, I agree. However, Iran will, as the deal illustrates, act in their own self-interest. Whether or not they have a bomb is relatively irrelevant, for the same reason that it doesn’t matter that Pakistan has nukes--they will never use them, as they, being a rational entity, will adhere to MAD. The Iranian government will not hand the nukes over to terrorists for that same reason.Source:1. http://nationalinterest.org...