The war both fuelled the fire of jihadism and distracted attention from the war on terror. The US expended the most blood and treasure, but the biggest strategic victor was Iran. The invasion mutated into occupation, insurgency and civil war that took a grim toll, with 4,500 US soldiers killed and a total cost of US$3.5 trillion. The consensus now ranks it among the worst foreign policy mistakes in US history. Yet now Western leaders act surprised that Russia carries a grievance and reacts like any great power would when strategic rivals engineer hostile takeovers in its front garden.Įven Westerners supportive of the Kosovo intervention were sharply divided over the Iraq War. The West repeatedly rubbed Russia’s nose in the dirt of its historic Cold War defeat, dismissive of its interests and complaints. Assurances that NATO wouldn’t expand even ‘ one inch eastward’ were betrayed in Kosovo and again in Ukraine in 2014. It marked the moment when Russia turned from a potential NATO partner into an implacable adversary once again.Ī badly weakened Russia, America’s only nuclear-weapons peer with a considerable potential for mischief, learned the lesson, bided its time and patiently worked its way back into being a spoiler in Europe and the Middle East. That goodwill was spurned and lost, and suspicions of Western intent and good faith were rekindled instead with the unilateral NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999.
Liberated from the yoke of totalitarian communism, Russians welcomed the prospect of good relations with the West. The peaceful manner in which the Cold War ended, with the defeated power acquiescing to the terms of its defeat, assenting to the new order and seeking accommodation and integration with the victors, is rare in history. Bush, Barack Obama’s drone policy, and Donald Trump’s decision to exit the Iran nuclear deal.
As a professor with some real-world experience, using long-term consequences for the world as the chief measure, my choices would be the Kosovo intervention for Bill Clinton, the Iraq War for George W. This prompts the question: what were the single worst blunders by recent presidents?Īnswers will vary from one analyst to the next depending on the criteria used and will be vigorously contested. The calamitous domestic political consequences will be matched by lasting damage to the US’s global reputation and interests.
Switching angles and timeframe, although few question the US decision to exit Afghanistan, few defend how it was done. Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt have long reigned supreme in the top four slots in C-SPAN’s survey of presidential historians. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. A common intellectual parlour game is to rank American presidents in order of greatness.
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